Should Children Read Books? Available to Purchase

The question of what it is fitting for children to read would seem to be one which is always being debated. “Cinderella,” wrote a woman in 1802, “is perhaps one of the most exceptionable books ever written for children. It paints some of the worst passions that can enter into the human breast— envy, jealousy, vanity, a love of dress.” The same writer disapproved of Robinson Crusoe, which, she feared, might lead “to an early taste for a rambling life and a love of adventure.” On August 12th, 1955, the leading article of The Times Literary Supplement, dealing with the quality of present day writing for children, speaks of “a kind of struggle that is now taking place in the battlefields of our children's souls between the child's active appetite for the particularity of experience and its passive vulnerability to the stereotype.” The Literary Supplement goes on to say: “Almost any child has at once more sensibility, and less discrimination, than almost any adult. And one of the most worrying things about some levels, at least, of our contemporary culture is the tendency to damp and dim that intrinsic sensibility and to exploit that innocence, that inability to discriminate.” This, be it noted, is not directed at the “Comics”, English or American, but at children's books, the books which fill the shelves of the libraries which the teacher is perpetually urging the child to join.