[Stoat]

Dorothea Israel Wolfson is a teaching fellow at Johns Hopkins University's Washington, D.C., Center for the Study of American Government.

She is a free lance writer and has been teaching courses in American Political Thought in the Hopkins program for six years. She earned her Ph.D. in political theory from Cornell University's Department of Government. A former policy analyst at Empower America, she later collaborated with William J. Bennett to write Our Sacred Honor and Our Country's Founders. Among her most recent publications is an essay on Thomas Jefferson in The Founders' Almanac (Heritage Foundation, 2001).

Government Program--Faculty biographies

[norton]

Don't know whether to barf, cry, or just nod my head -
ping

[sageb1]

Ironically, I thought immediately of Bennett while reading this excellent article. Thanks for posting it.

[Oberon]

pingage for later...and we're teaching Veritas Omnibus at home this fall, by the way...

[jeffc]

". . . in which absolute judgments of 'good' and 'evil' are no longer easily made . . ."

Maybe for them . . .

[Jemian]

Let me guess, the Anthology omitted Little Black Sambo and Uncle Remus. The first is set in India and the second is set... um... in the briar patch. Both are excellent and enjoyable stories.

[backhoe]

It's sorta off-topic, but I like the image:

[Freedom4US]

Welcome to the Brave New World of deconstruction and critical theory. Why anyone would send their children to public indoctrination centers (given a *choice*) is inexplicable. And these folks are just getting wound up.

[LexBaird]

The Norton editors break with him on this central issue. They do not believe in the possibility of a more rational world, or even, it would seem, in childhood itself. And so they 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.

They also know that propaganda works best on the most innocent.

[Billthedrill]

"Discourses such as reader-response theory, poststructuralism, semiotics, feminist theory, and postcolonial theory have proven to be valuable in analyzing children's books."

Those aren't discourses, they're pathologies. Insofar as painting the corpus of children's literature in different shades of black and furthering the careers of obfuscators and charlatans, they're perfectly useful. It does not occur to the purveyors of this sort of intellectual mishmash that they themselves will be the subject of similar critical studies some years hence when the principal question will be how anyone could have been so deluded as to think that they were accomplishing anything by it.

This sort of abuse is to the study of literature what an autopsy is to the study of a living body. "He who breaks something in order to understand it has left the path of wisdom."

[ctdonath2]

Original texts, or mutations thereof?
I'm increasingly impressed with how original Aesop, Grimm, and other tales were strikingly harsh introductions to the real world - not the TV-and-grocery-store fantasies we have today. Birth, life, suffering, conflict, success and death were _not_ treated or avoided gingerly, but presented starkly to teach children the ways & dangers of the world before fully encountering them. They were often far from happy fairy tales - they may involve faries, and may even be happy, but the stark reality of nature, survival, and tribalism were taugh in earnest.

[bannie]

Seeking stories which teach MULTICULTURALISM.