7 ms·

>Children don't need "historical honesty" I'm inclined to think they do, actually. Often the revisions soften the weirdness or offensiveness of outdated mores

>Children don't need "historical honesty" I'm inclined to think they do, actually. Often the revisions soften the weirdness or offensiveness of outdated mores, beliefs and customs, but by blurring them out, you miss a teaching opportunity: explaining how things were, how things are now, and why they changed. It's astonishing to read uncensored fairy tales from a few hundred years ago and realize how sanitized modern children's literature is. Kids need to deal with bullying, pain, prejudice, fear, failure and death, too, just like adults do. Dealing with them helps them be better equipped to understand the world. And I think that's doing them a solid.

googlryas 3y ago
Kids eventually need to understand those things, and maybe once they're old enough it could make sense to buy a 20th century edition and try to spot the differences and figure out why they were changed. But before that can happen, kids need to understand the basics first. If I'm teaching someone how to play chess, I'm not going to introduce an en passant until they've established they understand the more common ways in which a pawn moves. Is there any indication that children who were read those stories from hundreds of years ago ended up kind, caring, mentally resilient, etc...with whatever traits parents want to instill in their children today?
- niccl 3y ago
  > and maybe once they're old enough it could make sense to buy a 20th century edition ... Always supposing you _can_ still buy a 20th century version. Maybe I wouldn't feel so ambivalent about this editorialising if the editors committed to keeping both versions current
  - googlryas 3y ago
    Roald Dahl books have sold over 300 million copies worldwide. The stories have been digitized, archived, transcribed, and photocopied an uncountable number of times. I think we will have no problem finding the 20th century versions.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      But we will, and rather soon, because everyone who still has a physical or digital copy will be thinking the same thing you said - "oh, it's been printed in so many copies that there won't be a problem for you to find one" - as they shred their hard drive or throw the paper book into the fireplace. Just ask a random librarian or archivist how easy it is to find copies of local newspapers from 20+ years ago. Hint: often it's not possible, as the last library trashed its microfiche, in a mistaken belief that someone else surely digitized it already.
      - googlryas 3y ago
        I understand what you're saying, but that simply will not happen with something as widespread as Roald Dahl. Newspapers have always been ephemeral - books have not been. What would happen in Dahl's case is the price on the used book market would start trending upwards for the 20th century version, and at some point someone would decide to do another version to cash in and satisfy the demand.
        TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Sure, but then you don't want to rate a broad trend/policy by how it impacts the most high-profile cases, which by definition are mostly immune from negative consequences due to their notoriety. Move past the likes of Roald Dahl, towards less known authors, less widely spread works, and soon enough you may find works that are still culturally important, but not enough to secure their long-term survival. > Newspapers have always been ephemeral - books have not been. To a degree, yes. But then it's also been long recognized that local newspapers are a critical, extremely valuable window into the past. That alone justifies keeping archived copies - and I'm not talking about filling every libraries full of archival copies of major newspapers, but rather couple institutions keeping microfilms or digitized versions. As it turns out, those institutions end up assuming that the burden of preservation belongs to someone else, and this diffused responsibility leads to those "archived works" being lost forever. > What would happen in Dahl's case is the price on the used book market would start trending upwards for the 20th century version, and at some point someone would decide to do another version to cash in and satisfy the demand. Maybe, but I'm not sure if this holds in general, even for works of high notoriety. There may be some interest for the old edition, but if the new edition is good enough, there might be too few a people interested in the old one to make a reprint profitable. Or at least this is how it was before. These days, the cost of storing and delivering digital copies is near-zero, print-on-demand works even for niche works and very small audiences - but there's also so much content that the work could disappear simply because nobody cared about that work in particular enough to bother keeping a copy. Bytes may be cheap, but human attention is not.
- arp242 3y ago
  I read old Sjors & Sjimmie comics from my dad when I was a kid in the 90s. It's a classic "two boys have adventures" type of comic. Here's how the old comics looked: https://images.poms.omroep.nl/image/s750/784486.jpg https://images.poms.omroep.nl/image/s750/784486.jpg Sjimmie (the black kid) also spoke in broken Dutch, and was generally the stupid one. Even as a 10 year old I recognized it was pretty racist, because I grew up in an environment where this sort of thing is frowned upon. In the end you can only know about racism if you actually know what it looks like, up close, and without filter. When is too young "too young" for this? I don't know, but I think you're giving children too little credit; they're not entirely stupid. People in the past didn't become racist because of a few books or comics, they became racist due to the general culture at the time, and stuff like this is more a consequence of that than a cause. (The comic was revamped in the 70s to not be racist by the way, and these new comics were very popular in the 80s and 90s, but the originals were never revised or updated: they just made new, better, non-racist ones.)
watwut 3y ago
The most important lesson when giving kids fiction books is to teach them that these are fiction and not a historically accurate anything. That they can not take historical lessons from fictional words and assume real world worked the same way as the depicted in kids books. It is literally wrong to teach kids anything else. It is absolutely fine to tell the kids truth about history, including the fact that these or that popular people were widely cruel, racist or sexist or defrauded or whatever. But that is something completely different then giving the kid fictional story with schematic characters and claim that kid should learn facts about historical society from it. > It's astonishing to read uncensored fairy tales from a few hundred years ago and realize how sanitized modern children's literature is. Kids need to deal with bullying, pain, prejudice, fear, failure and death, too, just like adults do. Dealing with them helps them be better equipped to understand the world. And I think that's doing them a solid. Fun fact: censorship in the past was actually the thing. For example, German censorship during WWI made it unprintable to reference death in kids literature. Second, quite a lot of what was collected as fairly tales was not intended for toddlers and little four years old children the way we use them. Not just because of violence, they are just not structured for small kids, they are overly long and boring to them. They were for older children, stories then older people/youth told each other for fun. And in the past, what kids were actually pushed into were fairly often educational texts with clear moral learnings. They did not had movies in the past. There was no Marvel, no Game of Thrones. And quite a lot of these stories are contemporary equivalent of Game of Thrones - except shorter.

googlryas 3y ago

Kids eventually need to understand those things, and maybe once they're old enough it could make sense to buy a 20th century edition and try to spot the differences and figure out why they were changed. But before that can happen, kids need to understand the basics first. If I'm teaching someone how to play chess, I'm not going to introduce an en passant until they've established they understand the more common ways in which a pawn moves. Is there any indication that children who were read those stories from hundreds of years ago ended up kind, caring, mentally resilient, etc...with whatever traits parents want to instill in their children today?

niccl 3y ago
> and maybe once they're old enough it could make sense to buy a 20th century edition ... Always supposing you _can_ still buy a 20th century version. Maybe I wouldn't feel so ambivalent about this editorialising if the editors committed to keeping both versions current
- googlryas 3y ago
  Roald Dahl books have sold over 300 million copies worldwide. The stories have been digitized, archived, transcribed, and photocopied an uncountable number of times. I think we will have no problem finding the 20th century versions.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    But we will, and rather soon, because everyone who still has a physical or digital copy will be thinking the same thing you said - "oh, it's been printed in so many copies that there won't be a problem for you to find one" - as they shred their hard drive or throw the paper book into the fireplace. Just ask a random librarian or archivist how easy it is to find copies of local newspapers from 20+ years ago. Hint: often it's not possible, as the last library trashed its microfiche, in a mistaken belief that someone else surely digitized it already.
    - googlryas 3y ago
      I understand what you're saying, but that simply will not happen with something as widespread as Roald Dahl. Newspapers have always been ephemeral - books have not been. What would happen in Dahl's case is the price on the used book market would start trending upwards for the 20th century version, and at some point someone would decide to do another version to cash in and satisfy the demand.
      - TeMPOraL 3y ago
        Sure, but then you don't want to rate a broad trend/policy by how it impacts the most high-profile cases, which by definition are mostly immune from negative consequences due to their notoriety. Move past the likes of Roald Dahl, towards less known authors, less widely spread works, and soon enough you may find works that are still culturally important, but not enough to secure their long-term survival. > Newspapers have always been ephemeral - books have not been. To a degree, yes. But then it's also been long recognized that local newspapers are a critical, extremely valuable window into the past. That alone justifies keeping archived copies - and I'm not talking about filling every libraries full of archival copies of major newspapers, but rather couple institutions keeping microfilms or digitized versions. As it turns out, those institutions end up assuming that the burden of preservation belongs to someone else, and this diffused responsibility leads to those "archived works" being lost forever. > What would happen in Dahl's case is the price on the used book market would start trending upwards for the 20th century version, and at some point someone would decide to do another version to cash in and satisfy the demand. Maybe, but I'm not sure if this holds in general, even for works of high notoriety. There may be some interest for the old edition, but if the new edition is good enough, there might be too few a people interested in the old one to make a reprint profitable. Or at least this is how it was before. These days, the cost of storing and delivering digital copies is near-zero, print-on-demand works even for niche works and very small audiences - but there's also so much content that the work could disappear simply because nobody cared about that work in particular enough to bother keeping a copy. Bytes may be cheap, but human attention is not.
arp242 3y ago
I read old Sjors & Sjimmie comics from my dad when I was a kid in the 90s. It's a classic "two boys have adventures" type of comic. Here's how the old comics looked: https://images.poms.omroep.nl/image/s750/784486.jpg https://images.poms.omroep.nl/image/s750/784486.jpg Sjimmie (the black kid) also spoke in broken Dutch, and was generally the stupid one. Even as a 10 year old I recognized it was pretty racist, because I grew up in an environment where this sort of thing is frowned upon. In the end you can only know about racism if you actually know what it looks like, up close, and without filter. When is too young "too young" for this? I don't know, but I think you're giving children too little credit; they're not entirely stupid. People in the past didn't become racist because of a few books or comics, they became racist due to the general culture at the time, and stuff like this is more a consequence of that than a cause. (The comic was revamped in the 70s to not be racist by the way, and these new comics were very popular in the 80s and 90s, but the originals were never revised or updated: they just made new, better, non-racist ones.)

watwut 3y ago

The most important lesson when giving kids fiction books is to teach them that these are fiction and not a historically accurate anything. That they can not take historical lessons from fictional words and assume real world worked the same way as the depicted in kids books. It is literally wrong to teach kids anything else. It is absolutely fine to tell the kids truth about history, including the fact that these or that popular people were widely cruel, racist or sexist or defrauded or whatever. But that is something completely different then giving the kid fictional story with schematic characters and claim that kid should learn facts about historical society from it. > It's astonishing to read uncensored fairy tales from a few hundred years ago and realize how sanitized modern children's literature is. Kids need to deal with bullying, pain, prejudice, fear, failure and death, too, just like adults do. Dealing with them helps them be better equipped to understand the world. And I think that's doing them a solid. Fun fact: censorship in the past was actually the thing. For example, German censorship during WWI made it unprintable to reference death in kids literature. Second, quite a lot of what was collected as fairly tales was not intended for toddlers and little four years old children the way we use them. Not just because of violence, they are just not structured for small kids, they are overly long and boring to them. They were for older children, stories then older people/youth told each other for fun. And in the past, what kids were actually pushed into were fairly often educational texts with clear moral learnings. They did not had movies in the past. There was no Marvel, no Game of Thrones. And quite a lot of these stories are contemporary equivalent of Game of Thrones - except shorter.