So, no, I’m not saying God can never use children or that children’s faith and obedience aren’t sometimes an example and a rebuke to adults. There are even ways Jesus said we are to be like children.

But that’s not the spirit in some of the books I was talking about. You see a lot of it in made-for-TV films. One children’s book we checked out in Greenville without really examing it first turned out to be a new age book for kids (complete with an afterword by a spirit guide — it was scary, actually). But even before getting to that part, there were red flags — portraying it as ok for the child to throw a book at his teacher, someone telling the kids to drop everything they had ever believed before. In a lot of kid’s books it isn’t that blatant and obvious, but that kind of underlying spirit is there.

OTOH, one of my all-time favorite children’s books is Keep the Lights Burning, Abby, in which a girl has to do something she doesn’t think she can do, yet takes the responsibility and finds the strength to do it. She “saves the day” but in submission to authority, not in defiance, and matures ands grows in the process.

Yet the Bible is full of just these stories - off hand I can think of Jesus at 14 teaching in the Temple and worrying is parents, Samuel, David and Goliath.

Jesus is pretty obviously a special case.

And exactly when did Samuel and David, as children, defy their authorities?

I don’t like modern tales for kids that seem to urge them to defy authority (because the child knows the right thing to do and needs to save the day.) I think, even without a Biblical background, why would people want to urge children to be disobedient??

Yet the Bible is full of just these stories - off hand I can think of Jesus at 14 teaching in the Temple and worrying is parents, Samuel, David and Goliath.

I don’t like modern tales for kids that seem to urge them to defy authority (because the child knows the right thing to do and needs to save the day.) I think, even without a Biblical background, why would people want to urge children to be disobedient??

I don’t put up with any bullying in my classes or when I’m around (which is more than can be said for a lot of teachers/schools here in Japan, which turn a very blind eye to that stuff), but I’m not with the kids twenty-four hours a day, and I shudder to think of what goes on behind closed doors. You’re right that kids can be very cruel to one another- they seem very adept at finding just the right (wrong) way to twist the knife sometimes. On the other hand, I know some really good, hard-working, sweet-tempered kids, too. You get all kinds.

We would never tolerate in the workplace the kind of harassment and cruelty that goes on everyday in elementary schools in this country.

Personally, I think it’s difficult and a bit fallacious to try and pigeonhole all childrens’ literature, because it’s just too broad a genre. Good luck comparing, say, Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy and the Bobbsey Twins in any really meaningful way. They’re just too different- it’s apples and oranges, really.

I have nothing against entertaining children—or adults!—with fantasy. I do wish, however, that that the authors of such works would stop preaching credulity. The best works of fiction don’t require such rhetorical slight-of-hand, as they create worlds so internally consistent and rich that we don’t hesistate to buy into them (consider, for instance, the works of Tolkien or Rowling). Only hacks feel the need to teach our kids ignorance.

Gordo: I agree; “All we like sheep have gone astray….“

What I hate about children’s literature is the silly notion that children are good, wise and pure. Children are evil.