Books must be judged as literature on their own merits. And children should be given
excellent literature’ (34).
‘Children’ in relation to reading have something to do with particular ideas about
freedom and about emotion and consciousness, as Darton’s statement implies; the
‘child’ develops as a concept produced by ideas of liberation from restriction and force,
and is assigned various particular niches within cultural and societal structures. These
ideas of literature and liberation are in fact derived from the ideals of Western liberal
humanism, originating in classical Greek culture. This is clear if we compare Michele
Landsberg, Charlotte Huck and Glazer and Williams’s statements of the value of
children’s literature with the statement of the sixteenth-century humanist educationist
Juan Luis Vives:
poems contain subjects of extraordinary effectiveness, and they display human
passions in a wonderful and vivid manner. This is called energia. There breathes in
them a certain great and lofty spirit so that the readers are themselves caught into
it, and seem to rise above their own intellect, and even above their own nature.
Vives 1913:126There are not many clearer articulations of the power ascribed to literature in the
intellectual, moral or emotional education of children that dominates the concern of
children’s literature critics despite all their protestations of resistance to education or
the dreaded ‘didacticism’.
We may, incidentally—with respect to this relationship between the ‘child’ and specific
formulations of liberty or freedom—refer back to Tadashi Matsui’s linking of ‘the ideas of
European liberalism, the urban mode of living, [and] free mass education’ with ‘a
modern concept of the child’, as well as to Birgit Dankert’s statement on African
children’s literature, which highlights the complex status of children’s literature. It is
written of as if it can be a value-free carrier of an oral home culture (an ‘innocent text’),
when it is inevitable that as a product of a written culture’s liberal arts educational
ideals it carries these values with it, whatever the actual content of the book.
The Swedish critic Boel Westin echoes Darton while specifying further how this
ostensible move away from didacticism is seen by the critics as moving from adult
coercion to a consideration of the ‘child’:
Well into the nineteenth century, [Swedish] children’s books sought primarily to
impress upon their young readers good morals, proper manners, and a sense of
religion. In Sweden it was not until the turn of the twentieth century that children’s
literature began to respond to the needs of children rather than adults.
Westin 1991:7‘Children’s literature’ becomes defined as containing, both in form and content, the
‘needs of children’, and, therefore, this is how ‘children’s books’—written, published,
sold, and usually bought, by adults—come to be spoken of as if the ‘child’ were in the
book. As the New Zealand critic Sydney Melbourne states while discussing the portrayal
22 THEORY AND CRITICAL APPROACHES