Colonialism And Children's Literature

Children are seen as something pure and innocent in society. They are filled with naivety, and a sense of creativity and imagination. Or are they? Perry Nodelman wrote an article entitled The Other: Orientalism, Colonialism, and Children 's Literature. In it, he speaks of how not all children are as immature, or as lesser than society thinks they are. There are two essential points in Nodelman 's essay. Adults come up with strict ideas of what a child is supposed to be, and then makes it seem like this is the norm through manipulating children 's literature, and making matter of fact statements about children, in order to control what they think a child should be. Throughout Nodelman 's article, he compares how adults treat children with a

Nodelman claims that children 's literature ultimately has a larger goal than to entertain children, "children 's literature is essentially and inevitably an attempt to keep children opposite to ourselves and an attempt to make children more like us" (33). Adults fill their stories with certain morals and attitudes that are geared towards making them into what they have envisioned kids to be. Adults talk as if they remember what it was like to be a child, but Nodelman claims that this may not even be the case. Our idea of a childhood may be fabricated, "we [adults] ourselves in both our childhood and our adult lives have also read books by and had interactions with adults who worked to impose their visions of childhood upon us? Perhaps what we [adults] call 'childhood ' is always an imaginative construct of the adult mind" (33). Nodelman is saying that childhood is not as pure and innocent as any adult like to believe; adults have formed this idea of childhood being nothing but innocence. And, adults now impose this idea on children so the cycle continues, as they raise children to be a certain way that they have imagined children to