From the New York Times comes a review of Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature, a discussion of out-of-print children's literature that aimed to inculcate young minds with ideals of progressive social justice.Some excerpts from the article:
In Yehoshua Kaminski’s tale “A Little Hen Goes to Brownsville” (1937), translated from the Yiddish, a chicken sets out to use her near-superhero-caliber egg-laying skills to help the Brooklyn neighborhood’s babies, which she hears are “small and pale, thin and weak.” So unstoppable is her nutritional charity that she lays an egg in Times Square, gets arrested, pays her fine with another egg, and then pays her bus fare with yet another. The moral, Mickenberg and Nel infer, is that “justice is best served by a system that is not defined by the strict and inflexible administration of a legal code.” Also, that children should not go hungry.
[T]he verses of Ned Donn’s 1934 “Pioneer Mother Goose”: “This bloated Pig masters Wall Street, / This little Pig owns your home; / This war-crazed Pig had your brother killed”Continue Reading>>>
If only I had children to share this with!!
ReplyDeleteNew childrens books do not bite from one another enough.
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