Children's Literature and the Sociology of School Knowledge: Can This Marriage Be Saved?

ABSTRACT

I greatly admire many aspects of Joel Taxel's paper. I am not, therefore, blessed with the verve of the iconoclast because I wish to celebrate, question, and take exception to his position all in one paper. For example, I celebrate his careful textual readings, but question their narrowness and deplore their rigidity. I celebrate and share Taxel's genuine concern about the content of children's literature, but we part company when it comes to remedies.

In the first place I note the wisdom of carefully reading award-winning books for oneself. As Taxel discovered, the values one holds, and perhaps sees the larger society endorsing, may not be those of the adjudicators. In Part One of my response I consider “the moral of the story,” the heavy weighting accorded by Taxel to this as an overt element in text and the dangers I foresee in carrying this position to its logical extreme. The most serious aspect of Taxel's obsession with message or moral seems to me his conviction that he can detect ideology with absolute certitude, that this ideology will unquestioningly be transferred from text to reader in an unadulterated form and that there are definite, discernible limits to the possibilities inherent in a specific text. I am convinced that there are many possible readings of any text and that engagement with a text means, among other things, asking questions about that text—different questions with different readings.

Part Two of my paper is called “L'exactitude ce n'est pas la verité.” The surface of a text, what actually happens, is often far removed from possible truths embedded in the text. Taxel makes much of the identification of reader with fictional protagonist. I have some problems with his interpretation of this process and what I see as the severe and implausible limitations he places upon this dynamic of reading texts.

The following three sections deal in turn with each of the three award-winning children's books Taxel has analyzed. His attention to these texts is welcome: The criteria—for selection and the final choices should and do engender dissent and debate. While Taxel pays lip service to aesthetic values, his argument is based squarely in what he perceives to be the ideology of texts. If this perceived ideology offends him, he comes near to challenging the right of the text to be—that is, to be read. I question Taxel's readings and suggest other readings and interpretations of the award-winning texts, their social contexts, and their influence upon their readers.

In the final section, “Of Human Bonding,” I attempt a reconciliation between the principals (Children's Literature and the Sociology of School Knowledge) in what I believe will at best always be a tempestuous marriage. I acknowledge that Taxel and I are very close in interest, concern, and even in our hopes for the eventual outcomes among student, text, and context. The problems he finds and solutions he suggests, however, are in my opinion often reductionist and profoundly disturbing. They need penetrating analysis and careful scrutiny.