As the father of several little kids, I love to read them stories. Too frequently though, the books I pick up to read my kids are filled with liberal ideas. The hero is always the minority, or a government worker. The bad guys is always business, or unregulation. The messages is always fairness, equality of condition, and peace. These kinds of stories have a place- after all, sometimes the hero is a government worker, sometimes businesses are bad, and peace solves many conflicts. The problem is when children are read only the liberal messages, day after day, their entire lives, and they lose sight of the other more conservative messages that our country was built on.
For example, in Horton Hears a Who, Horton must protect the Who's because he is bigger and stronger than they are. Horton fights for what he believes in. And Horton believes. Messages about strength, fighting, and believing in something are absent from many other children's stories.
Or take for example the story of the Little Red Hen. Nolan Finley must have kids himself- his article today talked about how America has lost sight of our foundational principles as expressed in children's stories. He wrote:
From the feisty Little Red Hen we learned the rewards of hard work. We also learned to savor those rewards guilt-free and to understand that what we create belongs to us. The hen would have flailed the Rainbow Fish had he come sashaying around with his share-your-crayons silliness.
The Little Read Hen planted the wheat and ground the flour and baked the bread and felt no obligation to break off a piece for the shiftless sheep or do-nothing donkey -- unless she wanted to. She was my kind of chick.
But she doesn't fit into an America that increasingly questions the fairness of one person having more than another, without weighing sweat or skill. In the hen's world, if you produced, you ate; if you were able to and didn't, you went hungry. Why is that too sinister a concept to teach tykes today?
I agree- are concepts such as hard work and freedom now not PC enough for children to read about? Personally, I've always like the story of Mike Mulligan- but when I think about it, why should I feel bad for an outdated piece of machinery that does a poor job of things? He's not the hero. The Little Engine that Could is the hero- he thinks he can, and does. He thinks he can, and makes his dreams come true. I guess Mike Mulligan should be applauded for finding work for all those years, and trying- but in the end, he resorts to charity paid for by taxpayers. Compare that to the Little Engine that Could, as written about in Nolan's article:
The Little Engine is my favorite. He huffed and puffed up that hill on his own steam, and kept stubbornly going even when he wasn't sure he could make it to the top. He didn't pull off the tracks to wait for Dora the Explorer to give him a push.
The Engine's breed of self-reliance and determination to overcome obstacles would serve us well as we enter what promises to be the most challenging economic stretch in decades. Will we turn to the government to pull us up the hill, or will we get up a good head of steam and go for it ourselves?
Yes, laugh as you might, but I think that between Sesame Street and PBS and public schools, my children are getting enough liberal ideas. On my time, I'm going to read them the Bible, Rudyard Kipling, The Squire and the Scroll, Owen's Walk, America : A Patriotic Primer, The Adventures of Jonathan Gullible: A Free Market Odyssey, or even Aesop's Fables: A Classic Illustrated Edition (Classic Illustrated). These are the stories that should fill children's heads and hearts- stories of doing the right thing, of working hard, of having pride in your work, of being wise and cautious, of accepting responsibility, of believing in the power of God, of freedom and liberty and choice, and of the power of the free market.
I agree with Nolan's conclusion:
In a couple of weeks, a large number of voters, likely even a majority, will go to the polls to choose a political Pied Piper to lead them to an America where everyone shares and hugs and plays patty cake in equal-size houses. I'd rather follow that cranky Red Hen.
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