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# 2.3 Content, censorship and understanding

Now you’ll read the third and final excerpt from ‘Instruction and delight’. This activity asks you to reflect on the reading overall.

## Activity 2 Understanding the purposes of children’s literature (Part 3)

Allow about 20 minutes for this section

In this reading, Hunt challenges many of the assumptions that are made about children’s literature: in particular, that it is easy and less complex or serious than adult literature. Looking back at the reading overall, think about the idea that children’s literature is concerned with ideology and power relations. Then write a paragraph in response to each of the following questions:

1. What do you think is meant by ‘ideology’ in this essay?
2. What does Hunt think is the relationship between power and childhood?

#### Peter Hunt: Instruction and delight (2009)

### Part 3 – Content, censorship and understanding

A more obvious way of deciding what constitutes a children’s text might seem to be by looking at the contents. Are there certain things that, in our view, should not appear in children’s books – things, perhaps, that are solely adult concerns (such as sexuality) or which society tends to shy away from (such as death)? There are those who cannot understand what the savage and brutal myths and folk tales, concerned with murder, rape, incest and other horrors, have to do with children at all: as J.R.R. Tolkien observed,

> the association of children and fairy-stories is an accident of our domestic history. Children as a class – except in a common lack of experience they are not one – neither like fairy-stories more, nor understand them better than adults do.

(Tolkien, 1964, p. 34)

Melvin Burgess’s Junk is about drugs; Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy is about the death of God – and there is even a death joke on the second page of Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Should some books – such as picture-books depicting the bombing of Hiroshima – only be given to children under adult supervision? Both fantasy and realism have been frowned on: fantasy as providing easy, impractical answers, and realism as raising more problems than it can solve.

[…]

Children’s books are relatively vulnerable to acts of censorship because people in general feel confident of their authority to intervene. In the UK, unlike the USA, direct acts of censorship are rare: control is built into the children’s book ‘system’ by publishers and booksellers. Generally, however, the logic of censorship is often unclear. Does reading about, teenage sexual activity for example, encourage such activity, or is ignorance of such activity actually more dangerous? Very often, it seems that it is the adults who are protecting themselves, or their idea of childhood.

[…]

The study of children’s literature, then, is often hampered by unclear thinking – as when the second and third editions of Enid Blyton’s ‘Noddy’ series were simplified to match the reputation that Noddy has for being simple. It is a complex field, traversed by literary idealists and commercial marketers, literacy experts and committed parents, and graced by some of the most innovative talents at work in the arts. Far from being a marginalised study, it is central to the way culture develops – but to negotiate its many delights, we need to realise that, perhaps more than in any study in the humanities, we have a duty to make our own decisions and to realise our responsibilities. The study of children’s texts is technically more complex than the study of adult books, partly because the audience is different, and their responses more obviously unknowable, and partly because of the range of texts and the range of purposes. With the rapid growth of electronic texts, we are at a turning point, or a new starting point, in literacy and narrative, and children’s literature is in a key position. To understand what is happening to narrative and our children we need to understand the processes of decoding texts, as well as their history and their contemporary forms: the study of children’s literature can provide us with this understanding.

References

- Tolkien, J. R. R. (1964) Tree and Leaf. London, George Allen & Unwin.

What do you think is meant by ‘ideology’ in this essay?

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What does Hunt think is the relationship between power and childhood?

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### Discussion

In this reading, Hunt argues that children’s literature is deeply concerned with issues of power and politics, and that adults impose, consciously or not, their own particular ideologies on children. Whether this is the Christianity of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia series or the sexism of the Reverend W. Awdrey’s Thomas the Tank Engine books, children’s literature is never politically or ideologically neutral. This argument is also made by John Stephens (1992) who sees all books as intrinsically ideological, such that if a book appears to be ideology-free, this is because its ideology precisely reflects the reader’s own.

## Box 2 Ideology

Ideology refers to systems of established beliefs that people have about aspects of social life. These systems of beliefs are viewed by some research traditions as negative; for example, followers of Karl Marx view ideology as a form of ‘false consciousness’ or illusory thinking which causes people to have a distorted view of reality. Other researchers view ideology in a more neutral way as referring to different ways of construing the world and how it works; often these beliefs and assumptions are so taken for granted that they appear to naturally be ‘the way things are’.

Ideology is, however, a contested concept and, as a scholar, it is important to be clear about what meaning you ascribe to the term. In this course, the term ‘ideology’ is used to refer to the existence of cultural beliefs around language, literature and childhood, that is, what these are and how they function as part of social life. These conceptions can be both explicit and implicit (i.e. we can refer to them overtly, or they can unconsciously influence our behaviour), but in either case they constitute a shared belief system that influences the way in which we, as users of language, interact with language and understand texts.

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