Parenting: If your child reads these books, he or she is on the right path

2024-03-11 14:44:16

Culture pedagogy

If your child reads these books, he or she is on the right path

Status: 11.03.2024 | Reading time: 3 minutes

Hopefully the parents won’t notice!

Quelle: Getty Images/Rebecca Nelson

You can listen to our WELT podcasts here

In order to display embedded content, your revocable consent to the transmission and processing of personal data is necessary, as the providers of the embedded content require this consent as third party providers [In diesem Zusammenhang können auch Nutzungsprofile (u.a. auf Basis von Cookie-IDs) gebildet und angereichert werden, auch außerhalb des EWR]. By setting the switch to “on”, you agree to this (revocable at any time). This also includes your consent to the transfer of certain personal data to third countries, including the USA, in accordance with Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR. You can find more information about this. You can revoke your consent at any time using the switch and privacy at the bottom of the page.

Children do not read what mothers and fathers consider valuable. They don’t care about the “good book” and even feel patronized by their parents when they read it. This was the result of a survey of 1,000 children. What fathers and mothers can learn from this – and from their own youth.

Black pedagogy is back. And this time its color comes from the books that parents and teachers authoritatively recommend. A survey by the organization World Book Day among 1000 children has revealed something disturbing. According to this, around 35 percent of all respondents complain that they are not allowed to read what they want at school or at home. Instead, books are forced upon them. With the result that the children soon no longer read at all.

What’s frightening isn’t so much the complaint about school reading. The classroom is the place where you should be confronted with things in every subject that you wouldn’t have thought of on your own. And as a teenager you don’t want what you really love to be subjected to didactic vivisection until it’s just a dead text in front of you. On the other hand, some people are later grateful that they perhaps came across “Good-for-nothing” or “The Confusions of Pupil Törless” at school, which they would not have picked up on their own as a teenager.

More disastrous are parents who don’t let their children read what they want. Fathers and mothers should dance on the table with joy when their brood reads anything at all. The survey does not reveal which books adults ban and which they require. But a look at the programs of German children’s book publishers provides some clues: books with a message dominate there. Anti-racism, empowerment, inclusion, ecology, sex education and diversity are the topics there that attract parents who feel that their children are not bombarded enough with them at school, in daycare and on television.

also read

50 years of “Funny Paperbacks”

Those of boomer age experienced a similar pedagogy of children’s and young adult literature as children. The old teachers criticized the newfangled booklets in which cartoon ducks spoke in speech bubbles. Young educators annoyed us with “pear” books that made us feel guilty about South African apartheid. Or with “Red Fox” paperbacks that equated the treatment of Indians with the Vietnam War (we little cowboys felt equally guilty about both).

But escape was possible because the parents’ helicopter was not yet circling over the bookshelf or the comic book case under the bed. It was better to read stories about a bad student who was constantly fighting and whose best friend was a proud glutton. Or “Zack” comics with the aviator Mick Tanguy, who – we children on the edge of the zone happened to hear – was exposed as an “imperialist” on the GDR radio. Also the story of a witch who used her magical powers to torment an evil forester. The kind of book that is now considered so dangerous that the Otfried-Preußler-Gymnasium has to be renamed because of it.

All this left us with an inclination towards suspicious books. At the age of 20 you read Bukowski, “Ulysses”, Burroughs and Ernst Jünger. With today’s poor children, it won’t even be enough for the Green party program later on.