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Fearing for our Future Posting Date: Jan 12 2009 9:07AM I am scared poopless about the future of our country, our society … heck, our world. However, I’m not scared because of all of those ho-hum, got-the-T-shirt reasons like nuclear holocaust, terrorist threats, political instability, global warming, environmental degradation, financial collapse, superbugs, plagues, cancer, collision-course asteroids, rogue states and George W. Bush.
Actually, now that I list them like that, they do scare me. Holy crap. Did you see that list? Holy crap.
But if you’re like me, your fear skyrockets when you realize that we are living under a threat that could doom future generations to confusion and ignorance, thrusting our world into a downward spiral of catastrophe from which we will not have the capacity to escape.
I’m telling you, the state of children’s literature is appalling.
All through my adult life, it never occurred to me to be scared of children’s books. All I knew were my fond memories of the Dr. Seuss catalogue and the pop-up spectacular SuperPickle which is really underrated. I especially liked the part where SuperPickle saved Baby Gherkin from drowning. It was like Spider-Man, but at a deli.
Now, I’m the father of a one-year-old child who is obsessed with books. This means that a good portion of my day involves reading books designed for small children. When this began, I was looking forward to it, anticipating dipping back into Green Eggs and Ham or The Lorax, then I quickly discovered the merits of authors like Sandra Boynton who wrote a book that contains the line, “All the hippos go berserk!” How can you not like that?
But once I was past the cream of the crop, I realized that the minds of our children are being shaped, frankly, by morons. The main culprits are the authors of alphabet books. You’ve seen them. They don’t take a lot of effort to write. You take the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and you list them in order along with a picture of some easily-visualized noun. So, for example, the letter A is always accompanied by an image of an apple. The letter B usually gets a banana, a bear (of the teddy variety) possibly a balloon or a ball or, for those not worried about confusing children with homonyms, a bee (of the bumble variety).
Here’s my issue … Couldn’t we, in a book only twenty-six words long, come up with twenty-six good words? “A” could be something other than apple, couldn’t it? Ant comes to mind, possibly even asparagus. Aquarium would be excellent. The letter E is almost always elephant, something that is rarely a big part of childhood, or egg, something that looks like a blob on the page. We could upgrade that to exit, an obviously handy word, or eppe pen which in these days of everyone being allergic to everything is reasonably important for kids to know.
The letter I is invariably igloo which always strikes me as a bit of a relic, like using log cabin for the letter L. I think the words should be useful and therefore. For the letter I, I would go with ink jet printer.
Then there’s the letter O which is always either orange – basically an orange circle that confuses children who are trying to distinguish between the colour and the fruit – or octopus, hardly something most kids would find in the school yard. I think a good substitute would be opthamologist for all the kids with bad eye sight or maybe even oral steroid as a service to children with asthma.
I’ll let the use of X-ray and xylophone slide on the letter X and even give authors a mulligan for using the crutch provided by zebra for the letter Z, but what really makes my blood boil is the travesty of the letter Y which in my daughter’s books is either yo-yo – which I understand is selling almost as well as Wii Fit – or yacht. How many toddlers need to know about yachts? We couldn’t drop in a picture of a yoghurt or perhaps a yak (no more ridiculous than an igloo), a yam, yarn, a yearbook or a yield sign?
I tell you, the state of kiddy lit is yucky. |
