Children’s Literature Reviews: Challenges to Children’s Literature: Deskilling, Censoring, and Obsolescence
Deborah L. Thompson and Susan S. Lehr
The reviewers argue that teachers face a confluence of three major challenges: the codification of deskilling through national legislation, attempts to limit what children can read through censorship, and the difficulties of keeping abreast of the newest ideas, compounded by the immediate obsolescence of new science and social studies textbooks and teaching materials. The titles selected for this column help meet these three challenges with topics ranging from the fall of the Iron Curtain to the AIDS crisis in South Africa to life in modern day Vietnam. Books reviewed include adventures, fantasies, photographic essays, poetry, historical fiction, biography, and nonfiction. Each title invites students and teachers to resist the challenges of time-consuming, prescriptive reading instruction, to ignore the vocabulary police, and to dare to put obsolete textbooks on the shelf.
Volume 85, Number 3, January 2008
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