Literature plays a huge role in any person’s life who has the privilege of growing up in a place where education from an early age is considered necessary.
Reading is a skill children start learning before almost any other, and it obviously lays a foundation crucial for any further education. While reading is important, the content we read as kids is just as important.
This month, Scholastic Press announced it would stop publication of “A Birthday Cake for George Washington” by Ramin Ganeshram on the grounds that it misrepresents the lives of slaves during this time period. The book portrays slaves as happy instead of accurately showing the evils of slavery.
The Scholastic press release stated, “Scholastic has a long history of explaining complex and controversial issues to children at all ages and grade levels.”
This raises the question of where to draw the line between reality and age-appropriateness when teaching children about an important, but difficult subject.
The line between literature as an art and literature as an informative work can be easily muddled.
While I am a firm believer that you can learn from any piece of literature, no matter the subject, it is also imperative a reader realizes that it is also a work of art – something often written with the intention of revealing a truth, but not necessarily rooted in truth.
This can be obvious to most adults, especially with pieces that do not aim to document some part of history.
The kicker here is that children often aren’t fully aware of the historical context and accuracy of a book when they read it.
Critics point out that calling “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl” an uplifting tale wipes away the entire point of the work in the first place, which is to expose the reality of life as a Jew in hiding during World War II. The book has been transformed into an uplifting story over time through theater and film adaptions.
What remains is the fact that while children may not be ready to face some of the facts of history head on at such a young age, it doesn’t mean they can’t learn the simple truth about them from the start.
Sugarcoating helps no one. Making history a little nicer or easier to swallow only does future citizens of the world a disservice. Not only does it plant the seed of falsehood, but it also requires them to relearn the facts later in life.
Scholastic made the right move when discontinuing “A Birthday Cake for George Washington,” and hopefully it causes other authors and publishers to take a closer look at the information they feed children.
The spread of misinformation on issues like slavery and the Holocaust put the world in direct threat of repeating history and creating new generations of people unaware and uninformed about its past.
rarosens@indiana.edu
@rachrosenstock
