The Darkness Of Childrens Literature

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The “Darkness” of Children's Literature Darkness, brutality, violence, disillusionment, are these the words that come to mind when the topic of children’s literature arises? There is much debate today on whether or not children’s literature is too “dark” for its intended audience. Some define “dark” as those words mentioned above while others believe that anything that doesn’t leave a child happy and smiling signifies “darkness”. As Andrew Levy (2007) stated in his article “Campaigning parents plan to burn children’s books with grisly endings”, “Children’s books that don’t have happy endings should be banned, it was claimed yesterday”. Darkness is part of our everyday lives; while every child will react differently to “dark” stories they should not be protected from the realities of life; they should be exposed and educated about those realities. Encyclopedia.com defines censorship as the “official restriction of any expression believed to threaten the political, social, or moral order.” Because books often present controversial ideas or challenge the status quo, they are frequent targets of censorship. Book censorship can happen at many levels; nationally or locally at the community level. As a result, books can be removed from schools or libraries. Some groups also turn to book burning as a manner of censorship. In his article, Levy (2007) mentions the plan of such a group, “The Happy Ending Foundation is planning a series of Bad Book Bonfires for later this month, when parents will be encouraged to burn novels with negative endings.” Book burning is the practice of ceremoniously destroying books. It is usually carried out in public, and is generally motivated by moral, religious, or political objections to the material, with a desire to censor the material. America was founded on freedom of speech and although I feel there are lines to be drawn in children’s
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