Kids’ books that now make you cringe

Viewing 2 reply threads
  • Author
    Posts
    • #1814293
      Janelle Ward
      Member

      Did you keep your favourite children’s books for your kids and then the grandkids? Have you had to quietly put them in the bin or at least in a spot where they won’t be picked up?

      I’m thinking books like The Three Golliwogs by Enid Blyton (a favourite author when I was a kid and now soundly criticised) or the Noddy books featuring Big Ears or Little Black Sambo or Little House on the Prairie with its racist attitudes.

      Lecturer Dan Dixon says no sensible person would defend Roald Dahl’s character. “He was a professed antisemite. In the 1970s, he was forced by the advocacy of the civil rights organisation NAACP to change Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Oompa Loompas, who were originally depicted as pygmies brought from Africa to work in the chocolate factory unpaid.”

      Hence, there has been controversy over the rewriting of passages from authors such as Dahl and Blyton to remove potentially offensive material.

      Dixon says: “Is rewriting a sentence to expurgate an offensive term a form of vandalism, or is it no different from (or at least comparable to), say, translation?”

      Should those books be seen as typical of their time and quietly packed away or rewritten to make them more acceptable?

      Do you look back at those books and cringe? Do they make you realise how far we’ve come?

    • #1814834
      JayJay
      Participant

      None of the books I read as a child, and in turn read and introduced to the next two generations made me cringe, then, or now.

      What makes me cringe are the folk who view everything through today’s understandings, find the past so wanting they need to erase it completely, or censor it so the original is often lost, and often therefore, the magic.

      What makes me cringe is rhe proliferation of books for children so set on a moralistic ‘learning journey’ that fun and wonder are absent.

      And what makes me cringe is hearing/reading stats about the increasing number of young people not finding joy in reading.

      And I cringe at the demise of the simple pleasure of reading for enjotment.

      Indeed we’ve come ‘far’ – into a world of increasing preachiness where everything we do is judged against other people’s, often censorious, definition of worthiness.

      • #1814836
        Diogenes
        Participant

        Very well said Jay Jay

    • #1814835
      JEPY
      Participant

      The woke disease is rife and growing.

Viewing 2 reply threads
  • You must be logged in to reply to this topic.