When "Really Good" Books Hurt

When "Really Good" Books Hurt | Heritage Mom

source: https://heritagemom.com/index.php/2019/01/10/when-really-good-books-hurt/

I love books. I really, really do. The emphasis on living books is one of the things that led me to Charlotte Mason (CM). It resonated with me, and my children's education is resting upon a stack of good books.

Say! I like green eggs and ham!

I do! I like them, Sam-I-Am!

And I would eat them in a boat.

And I would eat them with a goat...

And I will eat them, in the rain.

And in the dark. And on a train.

And in a car. And in a tree.

They are so good, so good, you see!

So I will eat them in a box.

And I will eat them with a fox.

And I will eat them in a house.

And I will eat them with a mouse.

And I will eat them here and there.

Say! I will eat them anywhere!

I do so like green eggs and ham!

Thank you! Thank you, Sam-I-Am.

If you replace the "green eggs and ham" above with "really good books," you'll begin to understand my relationship with books and reading 🙂

Despite my love for books, I have limits to how far I'm willing to go.

If Sam-I-Am took those green eggs and ham and sprinkled them with a little vomit, I'm pretty sure the story would end differently.

Sometimes, I encounter "really good books" that have been sprinkled with a little vomit. And these books have been recommended by top-notch curriculum providers, trusted experts, and the most beloved bloggers.

Because I roll in CM circles, most of these puke-tinged books are considered living books. And they are, admittedly, really good. But lurking somewhere within, I've read words (or seen pictures) that have the great potential of harming my children.

I'm particularly attuned to these things because my children are black, but if I'm being honest, I think they have the great potential of harming ALL children.

The emphasis on reading living books in a CM education is ideas - not facts. So if a book presents many facts in a beautifully written way but includes spurts of racism, can it really be considered a good living book? If the book conjures up mostly great ideas in a child's mind but has just a little bit of racism sprinkled on top is it a matter of the good outweighing the bad? If a few of the living ideas in an otherwise great book are rooted in evil should we pretend they're not there and just hope for the best?

Is there room for just a bit of vomit on your food?

Or put another way...

If your daughter came to you years from now and shared that she intended to marry her boyfriend - a nice, loving, Christian man from a sweet family with the means to care for her and a desire to do good in the world - but every now and then...very rarely...he slaps her around a bit.

How would you feel?

Well, that is how I feel about my kids reading really good books with bits of racist or white-washed stuff in them. Exactly like that.

It is naive to think that our children only internalize the good ideas while somehow completely missing or easily forgetting the bad ideas.

"We give him miserable little text-books, mere compendiums of facts, which he is to learn off and say and produce at an examination; or we give him various knowledge in the form of warm diluents, prepared by his teacher with perhaps some grains of living thought to the gallon. And all the time we have books, books teeming with ideas fresh from the minds of thinkers upon every subject to which we can wish to introduce children."

Charlotte Mason Vol. 3, p. 171

Books teeming with ideas upon every subject to which we can wish to introduce children. Yes, teeming with ideas, but WHICH ideas?

Here are just a few examples of hurtful ideas presented in books recommended within the CM homeschooling community (and elsewhere, I'm sure):

A. Objectifying humans by considering slaves an enjoyable part of life. Imagine my "delight" when I got sucker-punched by our nature lore book this term. After spending 9 weeks delightfully learning about akenes and various fluffy plants, we started studying the cotton plant. I was reading aloud and came to this:

A cotton field is most picturesque during the picking season, when the negroes, the women with bright kerchiefs over their heads, go into the fields, pick the cotton, and carry it away in large baskets.

Little Wanderers

by Margaret Warner Morley (1899), pg. 42

This was casually dropped in between descriptions of the bolls splitting open and the fibers covering the seeds. What's the point of that? Is that REALLY what the sick author thought of when she wanted to describe the beauty of the cotton plant?

And the CM curriculum provider couldn't find anything better than this "really good" book?

I seriously don't get it.

This is a case of our desire to grab the very best living book on a subject overriding common sense. Reading about plants from this book can't possibly be more important than avoiding the sick description of (terrorized) picturesque (enslaved) negroes picking cotton (against their will) on the enslaver's work-camp (plantation).

Yes, they gave a teeny tiny warning buried in Week 10 of the lesson plans, but (1) I'm not looking at the plans that carefully by the time we're that far into the semester on a simple nature lore book and (2) my daughter could have been reading that book on her own. The note said to not say "negroes." How am I supposed to keep her from seeing that if she's reading it on her own?

B. White-washing history to make it seem like slavery wasn't so bad. In a history book that I haven't seen written into an actual curriculum but I know is used by many CM homeschoolers, a chapter on slaves and cotton says:

Yes, there was terrible, brutish, inexcusable meanness in slavery. But most slave owners - even if they were cruel - thought of their slaves as valuable property. They might beat them, but they tried not to do them serious harm.

A History of US

by Joy Hakim (Book 4, Chapter 30)

This statement is ridiculous. By "serious harm" does the author mean death? If so, she should have said, "They might brutalize and terrorize them in various inhuman ways, but many stopped short of actually murdering their slaves as they did not want to jeopardize their financial investment."

But as it stands in the book, children could be left to think that slavery was bad, but not that bad. The statement certainly doesn't conjure up some of the most horrific and inhuman slave punishments like executions, mutilation, sexual assault, torture, rubbing salt into wounds, brutal whippings, branding, shackling, and severe emotional abuse.

Yes, I know the details of many of these punishments are not appropriate for young children but neither is acting like things weren't that bad because no "serious harm" was done.

Later in the same chapter, the author says:

Remember, in the time of George Washington most Southern whites hadn't liked slavery; they just didn't know how to end a bad system.

Really? So most Southern whites were just good folks who have gotten a bad rap, eh? They were innocent and simply unaware of how to do better. Hmm. I think we all know that's not true. What about the Civil War? Reconstruction? Jim Crow? Segregation? Donald Trump?

C. Suggesting that the black historical experience in America is a shared experience. A history book recommended by one CM curriculum company includes this about slavery (emphasis is mine):

Two hundred years ago many millions of men and women were held as slaves in America and Europe. Some of these were black and some were white, but they could be bought and sold like so many cattle, could be whipped by their masters, and had no more rights than so many brute beasts.

Stories of America,

Volume 2, pg. 19

Well, that sounds pretty 50/50 to me. I guess we'll plant the seed in our children's minds that this wasn't really about black people because only some of them were black and some of them were white? That is a VERY misleading statement. It takes a little of the edge off of the ugliness of the truth, and it makes it seem like we were all in this thing together.

The same book goes on to say:

Today there is not a slave in Europe or America. All these millions of slaves have been set free. Do you not think I am right in saying that the world has grown better as well as richer? Why, one-hundred fifty years ago there were millions of slaves in our own country, and now there is not one in all the land. Is not that a great gain to mankind?

That's just plain false. It will lead a child to believe that everything is hunky-dory, and none of our children need to believe that. There are millions of slaves in the world today, and yes, some of them live in our very own country. Our kids need to know this as a point of being well-educated, but more importantly, they need to know so they'll share in the responsibility of ending this great injustice!

D. Presenting pictures that are worth a thousand negative words. Images are powerful. Some of the hurt in a really good book can come in the form of what is shown vs. what is said. The children's biographies beautifully written and illustrated by Ingri and Edgar d'Aulaire are staples in nearly every recommended CM booklist. We own all of them, and they really are lovely.

However, I keep the George Washington book on a high shelf with other good books that I don't want my children perusing on their own. Now why on earth would I need to keep a children's picture book out of reach of the children?

Well, before my kiddos are old enough to read, they love to flip through pages and look at...the pictures. The George Washington book has this beauty sprinkled in among the others:

George Washington

by Ingri and Edgar d'Aulaire

In this picture, the white people are inside having a lovely time dancing and enjoying each other...while the black kids are outside with their faces pressed against the window with the dog 🙁

Now I, as the adult, understand the historical context of this photo. My older children understand it as well. But my little boys? No. They could innocently be flipping through a picture book about an American hero and happen upon this picture where the kids who look like them are clearly left out in the cold, literally and figuratively. Without broader knowledge and context, this picture alone could lead to subconscious (or conscious) feelings of being "less than."

E. Connecting dark skin to negative attributes or white supremacy. These issues are not only found in non-fiction books. Let's take a look at The Secret Garden, a classic novel by Frances Hodgson Burnett. In Chapter 4 (linked above), this conversation occurs (emphasis is mine):

"It is different in India," said Mistress Mary disdainfully. She could scarcely stand this.

But Martha was not at all crushed.

"Eh! I can see it's different," she answered almost sympathetically. "I dare say it's because there's such a lot o' blacks there instead o' respectable white people. When I heard you was comin' from India I thought you was a black too."

Mary sat up in bed furious.

"What!" she said. "What! You thought I was a native. You-you daughter of a pig!"

The Secret Garden, Chapter 4

In this conversation, it is made clear that Martha is actually talking about people from India - not black Americans - but that matters not. It doesn't matter because it's still racist, and by the time my kids could connect that the inferior blacks being referenced weren't us, the damage would be done. It's another little sting in the middle of a perfectly sweet book. A little vomit. A quick slap.

And the list goes on and on.

Please hear me on this. I'm not saying that you shouldn't use any of these books, but I am saying that some are egregious enough to not be given a place on the shelf in any homeschool and others need to be recommended with a BIG BOLD caveat, if recommended at all. Or maybe they're OK for reading aloud where you can edit, but don't hand them over to your young kids.

Reading racist and white-washed stuff sometimes feels like a punch in the stomach. At other times it makes my skin crawl. But sometimes the reaction is not so visceral. I just take a mental note of the sting and keep reading. I can accept all of those things in my own personal reading, but I won't serve those ideas up to my young children under the guise of a "really good book."

Important note: I've gone back and forth on this in my mind, but I've decided not to include which curricula or experts are recommending these materials. Here's why:

Most of them are small businesses or organizations that are doing so much good in the CM homeschooling community. The good they do transcends my observations on their occasional missteps, and I do not wish to soil their reputations. I buy from these businesses, and I plan to continue doing so, so it would be hypocritical of me to exploit their weaknesses publicly. I believe that the inclusion of these books is a result of good-will. There is no evil intention, and that goes a long way with me. I don't want you to get bogged down on avoiding these specific titles or hyper-focusing on one vendor or another. The problem is ubiquitous.

The point of this post isn't to point fingers and blame. The point is to give insight into how hurtful some of the books we put before our children can be and what kinds of overt or subliminal ideas are presented in them. It is a reminder of how we must, as mothers, ensure that our children don't internalize literary micro-aggression - whether it is intended or not.

I don't want a sprinkling of vomit on my "really good" food. I don't want my daughter to marry a "really good" man who slaps her around every now and then. And I don't want my little kids to spend years reading "really good" books that hurt. All living books are not really good books.

For some of you, this is just a reminder to be ever vigilant about the presentation of ideas in your homeschool - overt or subtle. And for others, I recognize that it may be completely eye-opening to see these examples because you may have never noticed the racism or considered the potential impact on your child...and mine. I also know that there will be those who consider all of this trivial and will write them off as things to be overlooked for the greater good of the book. One instance? Yes. But sprinkled throughout an entire education? No way.

Food for thought.

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