The Analysis of Power in Children's Literature

Should We Burn Babar? Essays on Children’s Literature and the Power of Story is a powerful, important book that addresses issues that transcend children’s literature itself. Actually a collection of loosely connected essays, the book reflects author Herbert Kohl’s long-time status as a passionate advocate of children and progressive educational reform. Consequently, the book has at least as much to say about American education, past and present, as it does about children’s literature. Kohl’s desire to range widely is both the strength and the weakness of this engaging book. Its strength lies in the connections, both implicit and explicit, the author makes between a number of important, often controversial issues in children’s literature and the larger challenges facing the American education. The book’s weakness is that its very breadth precludes Kohl from fully exploring the critical issues relating to children’s literature he so tantalizingly raises in the early chapters of the book.

The title chapter seeks to question the enduringly popular Babar books “in the way children don’t, and speculate on the potential effects of this apparently innocent and charming tale” (5). Kohl’s analysis of the way “power is represented” in literature for children rests on an assumption that is implicit in virtually all controversies that surround children’s literature: That what children read matters and that literature may exert such a powerful influence on young readers as to be potentially dangerous to them. Kohl, the adult, is dismayed by Jean de Brunhoff’s elephant, as much as Kohl, the child, delighted in him and the other denizens of his fantasy world. Babar, and other “classics,” are problematic because their “content portrays, sanctions, and even models inequity.” Because the many Babar books are replete with the honoring of kings and princesses, the triumph of the strong and the mocking of the weak, the glorification of wealth and the sanction of “deserved” property, and portrayal of some people as civilized and others as savage, Kohl wonders if “we should avoid purchasing them and sharing them with our children: Should we burn books like Babar” (4)?

Kohl, of course, is hardly the first to pose such questions. Sims (1982), for example, indicated that “belief in the power of literature to change the world underlies most of the controversies in the field of children’s literature” (1). Such conviction, along with the desire to “protect” impressionable children from potentially harmful ideas, undoubtedly motivates most efforts to limit or proscribe the books children read, whether the efforts derive from political progressives or, as is far more likely, the Christian Coalition and other “religious right” groups. In view of the alarming growth in the power and influence of these conservative groups—they increasingly are successful in censoring a wide array of books they find objectionable, in mandating the teaching of “creation science” along with evolution, and in limiting teachers’ ability to foster the methods of open-ended, critical inquiry so dear to Kohl—it is unfortunate that Kohl has so little to say about the grave threat they pose.

Kohl is far too wise to offer simplistic and simple-minded answers to the complex issues he raises and despite his strong opinions, the chapter on Babar reflects more than a little ambivalence and uncertainty about the issues that surround the creation and selection of books for children. As a teacher, and as a parent, Kohl is well aware that we never can know precisely how children respond to literature and especially to those texts their elders find problematic: whether it be a book questioned because it is racist or sexist, or one challenged because it contains profane language, a frank treatment of sexuality, or because it includes witches and other supernatural phenomena. Indeed, one of many strengths of Should We Burn Babar? is its meditative quality; Kohl is frank and honest about his uncertainties, something to which many readers no doubt will resonate. While admitting that he may...