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avevale_intelligencer...on this article, and various reactions to it.
One possible definition of civilisation, used by Brian Aldiss in his The Dark Light Years (which I haven't read for a long time because I didn't like it much) is the amount of distance people manage to put between themselves and their own shit. For "shit," in this case, read "uncomfortable realities." I don't think much of this definition myself, but like anyone who grew up in Britain in the post-Victorian century, I am to some extent and in my own way a product of an attempt to put it into practice.
There is a lot more information about uncomfortable realities around these days than there was when I were a nipper, and some of it is even accurate. Accurate information is good, as long as one knows how to detect it, and how to deal with it when one's got it.
Kids, on the whole, look for limits. It's an important part of exploring their world. They want to know which walls they can break through, or tunnel under, or hop over when they've grown a bit, and also which ones they can lean on, build on, bounce off if they're going too fast. It's important, I think, that there are both kinds. To be told that there are no limits does not help them to build a coherent picture of the world, and in any case is not true. On the other hand, parents should only set limits that they can realistically keep, or their credibility will be destroyed.
If there is no information readily available to children on things that seem forbidden and therefore attractive, they will find whatever sources they can, whether they are accurate or not. If internet access is restricted in your house, you will (unless you're a pantywaist like I was) go to a friend's house, or a friend's friend's older brother's house, and look for whatever it was you couldn't find at home. The days when children could be kept under total control are gone; that ship has already encountered its iceberg.
I don't actually know where I'm going with this, if anywhere. I understand the anger that's been voiced in response to this article, which I think is ill-conceived, but on the other hand I don't know how I would have turned out if the deluge of information available to kids these days had been around when I was young and impressionable. It certainly doesn't sound, from the quotes and such mentioned, as if self-harm and other such things are being "promoted" or made to sound desirable, though that might not put off a sufficiently determined adolescent. I suppose one of the things I'm groping towards is that if it's easier for children these days to find information that helps them to discover who they are, even if that isn't who their parents think they are, that's a good thing; conversely, if it's harder for them to navigate through an increasingly confusing world where there seem to be fewer limits of any kind, it's all the more credit to them, and to their parents, when they do make it through safely.
As for the gender-specific lists, hm. I wonder how many of those books would have been deemed acceptable for any child back in 1963, when even "the odd" expletive was anathema? I can't imagine the teachers of my day being overly thrilled to discover one of their charges reading "Angelmonster," or even "True Grit." Perhaps Ms Gurdon isn't aware of how much "coarseness" and "misery" had already found its way into kids' lives when her own moral standards were set.
Please be aware when commenting that none of this is any more than one exceptionally uninformed old idiot's opinion.
One possible definition of civilisation, used by Brian Aldiss in his The Dark Light Years (which I haven't read for a long time because I didn't like it much) is the amount of distance people manage to put between themselves and their own shit. For "shit," in this case, read "uncomfortable realities." I don't think much of this definition myself, but like anyone who grew up in Britain in the post-Victorian century, I am to some extent and in my own way a product of an attempt to put it into practice.
There is a lot more information about uncomfortable realities around these days than there was when I were a nipper, and some of it is even accurate. Accurate information is good, as long as one knows how to detect it, and how to deal with it when one's got it.
Kids, on the whole, look for limits. It's an important part of exploring their world. They want to know which walls they can break through, or tunnel under, or hop over when they've grown a bit, and also which ones they can lean on, build on, bounce off if they're going too fast. It's important, I think, that there are both kinds. To be told that there are no limits does not help them to build a coherent picture of the world, and in any case is not true. On the other hand, parents should only set limits that they can realistically keep, or their credibility will be destroyed.
If there is no information readily available to children on things that seem forbidden and therefore attractive, they will find whatever sources they can, whether they are accurate or not. If internet access is restricted in your house, you will (unless you're a pantywaist like I was) go to a friend's house, or a friend's friend's older brother's house, and look for whatever it was you couldn't find at home. The days when children could be kept under total control are gone; that ship has already encountered its iceberg.
I don't actually know where I'm going with this, if anywhere. I understand the anger that's been voiced in response to this article, which I think is ill-conceived, but on the other hand I don't know how I would have turned out if the deluge of information available to kids these days had been around when I was young and impressionable. It certainly doesn't sound, from the quotes and such mentioned, as if self-harm and other such things are being "promoted" or made to sound desirable, though that might not put off a sufficiently determined adolescent. I suppose one of the things I'm groping towards is that if it's easier for children these days to find information that helps them to discover who they are, even if that isn't who their parents think they are, that's a good thing; conversely, if it's harder for them to navigate through an increasingly confusing world where there seem to be fewer limits of any kind, it's all the more credit to them, and to their parents, when they do make it through safely.
As for the gender-specific lists, hm. I wonder how many of those books would have been deemed acceptable for any child back in 1963, when even "the odd" expletive was anathema? I can't imagine the teachers of my day being overly thrilled to discover one of their charges reading "Angelmonster," or even "True Grit." Perhaps Ms Gurdon isn't aware of how much "coarseness" and "misery" had already found its way into kids' lives when her own moral standards were set.
Please be aware when commenting that none of this is any more than one exceptionally uninformed old idiot's opinion.
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no subject
Date: 2011-06-07 11:14 am (UTC)On the question of boundaries I totally agree, children will try to find the limits, and possibly go beyond them to see what really happens; as you said, if the people supposedly enforcing those limits are inconsistent then the children will 'learn' that boundaries have no force (until they come to one which kills them).
Not just children, either, one of Clarke's Laws is "The only way to find the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible". Or at least to try to do so. It was thought impossible for a person to survive travelling at over 30mph (and then at over the speed of sound), until someone did it.
On the impossibility of restricting what children see -- that's always been impossible, short of restraining them physically to their homes. I saw (and did) things which were forbidden at home by going to the houses of friends as a teenager. I brought in books which would have horrified my mother if she'd found them. That always happens. However, just because kids will find a way round it is no excuse for not bothering at all (just as the fact that some people evade taxes and break the speed limit is not justification for getting rid of taxation and speed limit signs), te point is that the child should know that what it is doing is considered unacceptable by those about whose opinion they care (if they don't respect the opinion of their parents then that's a different failure).
As I see it the problem is one of buck-passing -- many parents seem to expect schools or the government or some undefined 'them' to do the parenting for them. Of course, government has colluded in this by telling parents and teachers all the things they can't and must do (which started or at least became mainstream, as I recall, with Dr. Spock's ideas of "never punish a child"). The problem is that if an outside organisation does it then they impose their ideas on everyone (a parent who does let their child read LotR when "too young" will get punished, even if the child can perfectly handle it).
And along with that is the lack of parents actually talking and listening to their children. The number whose children read something they don't (fully) understand and don't then ask their parents (because the parents aren't interested).
I remember a story from a woman teaching in a poor area who had a kid come to her and confess that he's done something silly (and potentially criminal). When she took him back to his parents his father said "That was a bloody silly thing to do, and you'll have to be punished, you understand that?" "Yessir." "OK, now come and have a hug and we'll work out together what we can do to get through it." (Damn, that still makes me tear up! If you want to know the whole story as I was told it ask me offline sometime.) That's the sort of parent I admire -- firm and making sure that breaking limits doesn't avoid consequences, but still supoporting. Damn few of those around (I'm privileged to know several of a similar type, but I know of far more who will either let things slide or will punish without showing the support).
True, we didn't have the Internet when I was a kid ("back when FORTRAN was not even..."). But my mother found out pretty quickly that sending me to my bedroom wasn't much of a punishment, I had books there! She found other chores for me to do, and yes I was 'grounded' on occasion (not that the term was in use then). If parents can't physically stop their kids from going out now, because of legal issues, that shows where the problem is.
Yes, I looked at that list of 'recommended' books. I was actually wondering whether that was tongue-in-cheek, because I woudn't recommend many of them at all from the descriptions (yes, I read Fahrenheit 451 as a teenager, but I can't say that it increased my happiness). As for Ayn Rand as a role model, words fail me (whatever I think of her politics, her life was not something I would hold up as ideal).
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Date: 2011-06-07 12:52 pm (UTC)so on the first few occasions, I added my own rule for my lot that I would read the book first, since I had no idea about the likely content at the time.
If there were no restriction at all, then interested parents might not realise what is going on, and not start the lines of communication about their reading early enough. But it would be silly to try to ban them outright...
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Date: 2011-06-07 03:02 pm (UTC)I would love to see a multi-part classification system for books as well as films. Things like language, sex, violence, humour, romance, etc. all rated separately so that I could see in advance roughly what sort of thing it is (and someone who liked sex and violence could choose that if they wanted).
(Incidentally several people have found that over-use of age classification is counter-productive. Some kids will read books 'above' their age for social status, and a lot will refuse to read ones 'below' their age. And few readers accurately match the calendar and reading and emotional ages anyway.)
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Date: 2011-06-07 12:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-07 02:53 pm (UTC)No grin, I'm afraid, because that is exactly the type of judgement people do make.
I notice that she (and some of the comments) mentions parents talking with the kids. That's one of my points, if I read something in a book and was disturbed by it as a teenager then I would go and talk with an adult about it (sometimes my mother, sometimes someone else I trusted). And yes, I might get "where did you read *that*?", but after that it would be accepted that OK, I had read it and so it needed dealing with (explaining what they were talking about, or why it was an unusual or abnormal thing, or whatever). If you have that sort of trust -- and it could be with a teacher or an older friend, not just a parent -- then there is no problem, because te adult will likely know about it before the kid gets that far.
My aunt taught in secondary school, mostly 6th formers. And, because it was out on desk in class, she had to confiscate "Lady Chatterley's Lover" from a kid (not because of the subject, but because they were reading non-class materials when they should have been studying). As it happened, the kid forgot to pick it up at end of class so my aunt took it home and read it -- and found it pretty boring. So when she gave it back to the kid she asked "Do you enjoy that book?" The kid answered that no, it was actually pretty boring, but "everyone was reading it beacuse it was forbidden". Putting it on the 'banned' list makes sure that it becomes popular...
(The same with smoking and drinking, incidentally. One of her pupils turned 18 and she asked him if he was going to go out and smoke and drink in celebration. "No point," was the answer, "I've been doing both for several years because it was forbidden but now I'm legal there's no fun in it any more.")
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Date: 2011-06-07 03:21 pm (UTC)I've never tried "Lady Chatterley's Lover", but it's on the list of "classics I should read sometime".
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Date: 2011-06-07 03:54 pm (UTC)(The same happened, I remember, after the song 'Caroline' got banned by the BBC because it was the theme song of the pirate radio station of that name. Both the record sales and the station listening figures rose. And at one time some pop artists were desperately trying to get the Beeb to ban them to increase sales. Eventually Auntie got wise to this and stopped banning things...)
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Date: 2011-06-08 06:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-08 07:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-08 09:12 pm (UTC)(I was spoiled for reading the Star Trek novels, because the first ones I read (apart from the James Blish 'novelisations') were hers. And then I found that very few of the other ST authors were up to her standard (John M. Ford, Janet Kagan, Barbara Hambly, and possibly a couple of others, came close, most of the rest were not in the same ballpark). I think I have copies of everything available of hers, including the first paperback edition of "Door Into Fire"* with the barbarian warrior with a half-naked woman cralling up his leg (totally inappropriate for the book) which some day I'm going to get her to sign because she hates that cover *g*.
* How many ways it it possible to spell 'door'? I just went through at least four, 'correcting' it to a different misspelling (dore, dorr, doot, doro, ...) each time!
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Date: 2011-06-09 12:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-07 04:13 pm (UTC)My mother was an avid reader of mysteries, and all the murder mysteries were adults only. I remember my mother recommending I read Dial M for Murder while she had it checked out, but the cover and the decal scared me too much.
From what I could tell, there were no strong expletives in any of the adult books, but some had racy innuendo, or drug use, or illicit out-of-marriage relationships. But most were tagged for violence.
Today the bookmobile is your computer, and as you said, there are really no limits to what a child who can read can obtain. I'm not sure I have a problem with that.
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Date: 2011-06-07 07:02 pm (UTC)1) Grimms' Fairy Tales and Andersen's Fairy Tales. Here, we have murder, torture, death, poisoning, abuse, revenge, occasional cannibalism, yet these are /children's tales/. Cinderella's stepsisters get their feet mutilated and their eyes pecked out. Snow White's stepmother is forced to dance in iron shoes on a red hot floor until she drops dead. In Andersen, you have the tale of the Red Shoes, which force a girl to dance until she cuts off her own feet, for the sin of wanting red shoes instead of black ones!
2) Anne of Green Gables, one of the works that a commenter thought should should be read instead, has a girl who can't control her temper, breaks things over a boy's head because he teases her about her hair color, gets her best friend drunk, nearly drowns because she wants to pretend and 'borrows' a boat to do it, not knowing that the boat was leaky, takes foolish dares and injures herself because of it, and dyes her hair when she's twelve, when that was considered 'wicked' at any age.
The fact is, kids want to read about themselves. The reality today isn't really any darker than it was then, it's just more publicized and kids are more used to it. Should abuse, drugs, divorce, homosexuality, and murder not be written about because people want to believe that teenagers are innocent, thus leaving them no heroes to look up to and no way to deal with the reality handed to them?
no subject
Date: 2011-06-07 10:17 pm (UTC)Also, the only versions of Grimm and Andersen I encountered when young were heavily watered down, and while I haven't actually read Anne of Green Gables, isn't it true that the reason she's shown as doing those things is so that the dire consequences can be pointed out as a lesson to the reader?
I'm not disputing your main point, and I'd be the last to suggest that teenagers are or should be innocent or that the morality of the nineteen-fifties will still serve us today. But I think in some ways reality *is* darker today.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-08 06:14 am (UTC)I agree that I don't want the people in books to be too much like me -- someone exactly like me would be dead boring*! At the very least I want them to do things that I don't, that's the point of escapism. (I'm an escapist, and, erm, my name is Chris. Hello Chris!) So yes, Biggles, and Rex, and Chris Godfrey, and John, and Peter, and so on. Some of those were around my age, so it was sort of "there, but for the vagaries of fate, could go I", but some weren't and some lived in clearly a different universe (the Walkers I could believe lived in mine, I wasn't sure about the Pevensies although for some time I tried to get into Narnia, but people like Batman (and indeed pretty much anyone living in America) were clearly not on the same planet).
* I remember when, as teenagers, we found my mother'd diaries which she wrote as a teenager. You'd think that living though the war would make an interesting diary, yes? Nope, they were full of "Didn't see Tom today, walked home with David". The only mention of the war, in something like 5 years of diaries, was the bald statement on one page that said "Liberated Paris!" All by herself, one imagines, having no idea from the diary why Paris might have needed liberating. I gather that she did actually enjoy her life at that time, but to outside people it wasn't what we want to read. And mine at the time was no more interesting...
no subject
Date: 2011-06-08 07:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-08 09:02 pm (UTC)Yes, I still have dreams of discovering that I have mutant powers, or that an alien princess is going to land her damaged spaceship where I can mend it for her and she'll take me with her (and incidentally put me into a medical box so that I become tall and slim and young) and that sort of thing. But I don't believe them. Perhaps that's why such things won't actually happen to me, I'm told you have to believe really really hard (and then they put you in a nice padded room *g*).
[1] Although "like me" is a pretty loose matching algorithm, really, since some of them were female and I'm not, and some were adults or aliens and I wasn't them either. Heck, I "resonated with" Hal Clement's centipede-type people on a 600g planet, and with his detective who breathed liquid sulphur!
no subject
Date: 2011-06-09 12:30 am (UTC)I don't think most people really believe that these things will happen to them, any more than people who read murder mysteries or like slasher films think they'll be in the middle of one. But the main characters have to have /something/ one can identify with, in order to like them. Nor does it mean that most people who read dark things will do dark things. Which was, I think, part of my original point. (At this point, I can't remember which points I was making!)
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Date: 2011-06-08 07:27 pm (UTC)But reality's been pretty dark for a long time. I was a teenager in the Eighties, and what was popular when I was in high school was V.C. Andrews. And what I was made to read in high school wasn't Grimm's or L.M. Montgomery, those were for /children/. (Although, yes, the point of a great deal of that were for consequences. And Anne mostly didn't have dire ones. She had to be grateful to someone she didn't like, she didn't get to talk to her friend for a while, and she had to have her hair cut off. Not very dire.)
These are teenagers. When I was a teenager, in school, I had to read the 'classics'. All of my first semester of American Lit seemed to be about adultery, and for World Lit, I can tell you, Thomas Hardy and Aldous Huxley aren't exactly light-hearted. Or the Brontes.
Although, your point about wanting to read about people entirely unlike you does explain the current YA trend of people dealing with the supernatural. Vampires are popular, and werewolves, and witchcraft. But by the same token, these things have been popular for a long time. Which is why I think that article is crap. Any teenager who reads a book and then tries to reenact it has bigger problems than that they read dark literature, and blaming teenage behavior on the books they read is like saying that J.D. Salinger is responsible for any murderer who ever fixated on that godawful "Catcher in the Rye."
(I do apologize if I'm terribly abrasive about this, it's just that I /resent/ the implications that teenagers should dumb down their reading levels to make adults more comfortable.)
no subject
Date: 2011-06-08 10:21 am (UTC)Is our world grimmer than is was half a century ago? Truthfully, no. It's no better, mind you, but it's no worse. Are we more aware of the darker side? Probably. Do children's books go too far in the pursuit of misery? Not sure, but probably. But then again, children's book usually do. In their own way, the Famous Five books are just as extreme as anything you will find today.
I sometimes think that the great mistake we ALL make is to forget that - as children - we had one, and only one, real ambition; to become adults as soon as possible. Why we forget it, I am unsure, but we do. And that act of forgetfulness probably explains a lot of the errors we as a society, and as individuls, make in caring for children.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-08 07:48 pm (UTC)I can say with absolute certainty that I had no such ambition. I saw many kids around me who did, but I did not. And I can't be unique.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-08 08:50 pm (UTC)No, I didn't want to "be a grown up". I wanted some of the privileges that some grown-ups seemed to have, certainly (being able to go to bed however late they wanted, and being able to buy stuff, and do things without being told "you're too young") but not the other things that go with it (falling asleep at work, work itself in order to buy stuff, being told you're "too old" to do things which are fun), and I knew too much about those negatives to want to go there (because I saw them in adults I knew). And I knew, even then, that unless you are independently wealthy you don't get to play Batman even as an adult, and that most adults were too busy or tired (or broke) to have much fun, and similar quid pro quo (and you got a lot more quo for a quid in those days!).