IOC Practice

How Children's Literature has Changed, and Been Changed by Society

Jim Thompson

10/21/19 

Children's books are a ubiquitous part of our culture. They form the basis from which most kids learn to read as well as their first cultural experience and memory. Most children's books are also a child's first experience hearing about something without actually being there to experience it. This makes those books are essential in the development of a child. This is why I wanted to look into children's books, they are so crucial to children and thus overall societies further development, and more attention should be paid to them. One specific thing that I noticed while looking into changes in children's literature was the change based on time. Most things change with time, but children's books seem to have been one of the more affected parts of literature. We still read older books and stories in later years of school or as adults, but it is very rare for parents to read classic fiction to their children at a very young age.
Another thing that has changed drastically over the last 200 years is how children grow up and what their childhood was like. For the sake of this article, I am specifically referring to lif for someone between birth and age 10. A lot of the change in upbringing surrounded reading and education of children before they attend school and of course, during their first years of elementary. Most of this change is in the context of a set of important achievements in life defined by our culture, such as learning to walk, speak, and read. Some of these occur naturally or with only basic promoting, such as walking or talking. Reading, however, is highly dependent on the child's parents and their upbringing. Whatever the parents choose to read to their child directly impacts their function in school as well as their cultural understanding.

The impact that early reading has over children led me to the main idea of this article, how has change in children's books affected the change in the way kids grow up and interact with or understand their social setting. For this comparison, I picked out a few children's books written in about the last 50 years, such as Go Dog Go or a number of Dr. Seus stories, and some stories from the 18th and 19th centuries, such as the 3 Musketeers. The first thing that I noticed was that modern stories are greatly simplified in their language compared to old stories as well as somewhat shorter on average. This is indicative of a shift in the cultural meaning or use for early kids' books, mainly the shift from telling an important story to helping the child to learn to read and understand on their own. Go Dog Go, for example, utilizes numerous repeated phrases and words while also using very little description or complex or superfluous language. This repetition makes the book seem more like a lesson in English disguised as a story. The mission of learning does not mean that these books are not good as stories on their own, however. Most of them also do tell a story, usually one that has a clear moral dilemma and thus reached children some basic societal norms and concepts at the same time as teaching them how to read or even speak. Older stories, on the other hand, place much more importance on the story itself, at the expense of ease of reading. Most of the concepts are the same; however, and older stories still try to install societal and moral values into their readers the same way that modern kid's stories do. 

The simplification of children's books is indicative of a clear societal shift toward learning and education in school. In modern times it is expected that the kind of storytelling that is abandoned in modern books will be taught in school at a later time and thus the most important thinking for early books to do is to teach children how to read so the can pick up the information left out of those books at a later age on their own. This shift is mirrored in the education system itself. Back when those more complex stories were written, education was much less important, especially early education. Most people only learned how to read because they needed it later in life for a job, not because reading itself was required for school. Many people could not read at all and do not need this education at all. Man of the stories from that time is thus made so they can be told verbally and be more of an interesting story than a teaching aid. Even people who do not know or intend to know how to read can gain the intended value or message from the story. A modern kids' book, in this case, would be much less helpful or interesting because of how it is written and its main purpose as a tool for learning how to read quickly and as a story second. 

Overall the change in children's literature is part of a greater shift in societal norms on how someone should grow up and get educated. The value of books at a young age shifted from telling the important stories and morals mainly without much interest in learning to create itself, to help the listener or reader learn to read themselves firstly and as a story with an idea to communicate secondly. This works because it fits into the greater scheme of modern education where the same children will use the reading skills that the learned from children's books to read the very same old stories that were replaced on their own at a later age. This also shows a greater shift in the value of reading from a toll for some professions or parts of society to a necessity to understand and learn other things that allow you to function and work in any profession or even learn about them. 

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