Monday, July 17, 2006

Today's New England Primer


In the Summer 2006 Claremont Review of Books, Dorothea Israel Wolfson reviews the Norton Anthology of Children's Literature, and finds in it a desire to turn children into adults. This is done specifically by using literature as a tool to turn children on to "the grim realities and multicultural obsessions of contemporary adults."

[...]

Wolfson compares the kind of children's literature admired by the Norton editors to the orthodox Christianity passed along in the Puritan readers of old. The new children's literature mavens, she writes, "have more in common with the New England Primer than they dare to admit. They, too, are obsessed with death and the apocalypse, only they don't believe in redemption."

Russell D. Moore, Mere Comments

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