{"id":55498,"date":"2020-03-07T03:00:44","date_gmt":"2020-03-07T08:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=55498"},"modified":"2020-03-06T14:49:11","modified_gmt":"2020-03-06T19:49:11","slug":"kidlit-is-woke-woke-woke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2020\/03\/07\/kidlit-is-woke-woke-woke\/","title":{"rendered":"KidLit is woke, woke, woke<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ed West<\/a> on the amazing amount of propaganda that has been pumped into books for children:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

“New Spin on YA”<\/a> by Salem (MA) Public Library<\/a><\/span> is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0<\/a><\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

When my daughters were around six and seven, they started French classes at a children’s library in our borough; I had been to our local library countless times but had mainly confined myself to the infant section, and older children’s books were something of a revelation. The entire front desk area was made up of hagiographies of Barack Obama and Nelson Mandela.<\/p>\n

And hagiography is the most accurate term: these books were just like the ones I used to read in church. Here Blessed Nelson forgave his jailors, here St Barack healed America of its racial sins \u2013 and these are just a couple of examples.<\/p>\n

It was a bit of a surprise \u2014 learning just how much the tone of kids’ books had changed since I was young and we wore onions on our belts<\/a>. Nowadays, progressive politics is ever-present in children’s books. Which is fine, if you’re a believer; but if you’re a conservative, you’re faced with raising your children in a culture which is filled with messages you disagree with \u2014 sometimes misleading, sometimes anecdotally true but not representative, often just anti-wisdom, giving children the worst possible advice in life. And it’s becoming worse: since about 2016, children’s books have grown way more explicitly political.<\/p>\n

Last month, a friend went to Tate Modern and took a picture of the young children’s section. Among the books on display are biographies of Greta Thunberg, something called Queer Heroes<\/em>, another work called The Rainbow Flag<\/em>, books about refugees, the bestselling Good Night Book for Rebel Girls<\/em> \u2014 and its countless imitators. Whether you support it or not, this is propaganda; the aim is to raise a generation of progressives just as those Lives of the Saints<\/em> were designed to bring forth young Christians.<\/p>\n

And it works. Conservative ideas are very much in retreat, the subject of a brilliant new book<\/a> I recently read (which, admittedly, I also wrote).<\/p>\n

From a very young age, children are read books and shown films that teach them the core progressive messages: that we are all basically good and only behave badly because of circumstances; that borders and barriers are bad, stereotypes are wrong and girls ought to adopt traditional male gender roles if they want to be respected.<\/p>\n

Stereotype inaccuracy is a popular idea \u2014 and a false one<\/a>; in so many kids’ stories the unusual stranger or alien or wild animal who turns up in the neighbourhood will defy the small-minded pessimist who expects the worst. When it comes to gender politics, no self-respecting children’s book in the 21st century has girls aspiring towards being a princess and living happily ever after; to the post-ironic upper-middle-class parents who are the publishers’ main audience, that would just be lame.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ed West on the amazing amount of propaganda that has been pumped into books for children: When my daughters were around six and seven, they started French classes at a children’s library in our borough; I had been to our local library countless times but had mainly confined myself to the infant section, and older […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,28,53],"tags":[374,298,1020,269],"class_list":["post-55498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-media","category-politics","tag-children","tag-libraries","tag-progressives","tag-propaganda"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-er8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=55498"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55499,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55498\/revisions\/55499"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=55498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=55498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=55498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}