In describing some of the Young Readers fiction I’ve been reading lately, I’ve concentrated on its penchant for literary malpractice. The writers and editors seem to be purposely trying to stunt the readers’ mental growth.
But they’re also throwing poison darts at moral growth.
It’s not just that they have characters inhabiting exotic, imaginary worlds talk like not-very-bright middle school kids who watch too many cartoons. It goes way beyond that.
Granted, if you want to write about the daring adventures of a character who’s 12 years old, you’ll have to find a way to get him out from under the direct supervision of his parents. No parent in his right mind consents to his child being involved in life-threatening adventures.
But in these books–again we resort to Tui Sutherland’s Wings of Fire series by Scholastic Books–adults are not just inconvenient. They’re selfish and cruel, and a menace to their own children. So the juvenile dragons, because every adult dragon’s hand is raised against them, can only look to their age-group peers for love and loyalty. “Don’t trust anyone over 30” has metastasized into “don’t trust anyone over 13.” Even their own parents are perfectly happy to sell them for a cow or two, and the daughters of dragon queens are expected to kill their mothers: it’s the only way a dragon tribe can get a new queen.
In Scholastic’s Spirit Animals series, assorted authors depict an 11-year-old girl using the inevitable jumpin’, spinnin’ kicks to beat up and sometimes even kill adult bad guys. The kids in these books are always coming to blows with adults. Again, grownups are basically bad and you just can’t trust them. Only the kids in your public school class will be true to you.
Gee, that ain’t the way I remember childhood.
These books are important because they are part of the Godless, Christless, hubris-laden pop culture that gets poured into our heads every day. Children are highly susceptible to it. This bilge helps shape a person’s character. It gets mixed into his foundation.
We need to start paying closer attention to what our culture is teaching us. Adults and children both.
I have noticed many similar things to this.
A few years ago in England a book was published aimed at early teens about a girl who habitually turned into a precocious dog to express her lust. This filthy piece of brainwashing found its way into some school libraries.
Nearly every modern Disney film has an anti-tradition, anti-parent message, serialized children’s TV is often even worse, schools and social workers in most countries are being used to undermine the parents by the state (a consistently recurring “liberal-progressive” theme is the attempt of the state to weaken the rights of parents and to intrude more and more into family life).
Just like everything that is produced by the corrupt modern Western liberal society these books were created by stupid people who simply don’t care about human decency or the impact of what they are doing. Indeed behind all these trends are malevolent forces which want to make the world anew according to their ideology – an ideology that must be promoted through subversion because sane clear minded individuals would reject it.
My battle with the occult and mind-warping literature that was being offered to my 9 year old daughter in the 90’s began with Harry Potter. I read one paragraph of the first publication and promptly met with the elementary school librarian to voice my complete disapproval with the book even finding a place in the shelves of a small town school library. She likened the storyline as being no more harmful or “occult” than Huckleberry Finn. HA! So much for librarians that are, as Archie would say, “meatheads…dead from the neck up”!
Now my daughter is 22 and a senior in college, and her major is in Sociology, and her minor is in Psychology. Ai-yi-yi!! It is all I can do to hold her feet to the Christian fire she has embraced since the age of 2. She is hoping to use her degree to enter the fields of advertising and creative writing…THANK GOD!! Any fields promoted by the Liberal Arts departments other than those are just a part of the WIDE path to destruction that her generation, for the most part, has very narrowly escaped due to Christian roots and a REAL relationship with God. Therein lies the ONLY hope for the World.
Lord, help us all!
And I’ve only been writing here about Young Readers fantasy fiction–the “mainstream” stuff, the books that win awards from the American Library Assn., are downright filthy.
Lee , I have always said that danger of the public school mentality and the whole “teenagers are naturally rebellious” myth. comes from having to put your peer groups above your family. I was cowed into behaving like my peers in school and doing things that would have shocked my parents . I saw more of my “Friends” than I did Mom and Dad. My children were different , we home schooled and Mom and Dad were their peer group. They had lots of friends their age , but they were more concerned about fitting in with the family and church than they were any friend.
Ron, you’ve hit the nail bang on the head! But see, when we went to school, no one suspected there was anything wrong with it. There were no teacher unions, gender coaches, “gay-straight alliances,” etc. Nor did our parents ever have occasion to read the 100-year-old writings of the individuals who created and developed public education. If they had read these articles, we all might’ve been homeschooled.
Public education has always taught two things well: conformity for its own sake, and rebellion for its own sake. It does indeed alienate children from their families. Even when the teachers were sane and decent people, the mechanics of the system tended toward these goals.
The us against them mentality portrayed so often in entertainment for the youth is truly distressing. Sadly, most parents never pay more than superficial attention to what their children read.