Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Non-Fiction for Children: Does It Really Exist?

1987; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 12; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chq.0.0086

1553-1201

Perry Nodelman,

Digital Storytelling and Education

Non-Fiction for Children:Does It Really Exist? Perry Nodelman In his article about biography in the special section of this issue, William H. Epstein speaks of his young daughters' bafflement when their grade two teachers insisted that the biographies they were studying were different from other sorts of books they had read—that it was important that this sort of writing was about people who had once actually been alive. It's intriguing that, without the teachers' guidance, these children didn't find that main distinction between fiction and non-fiction interesting, and would not have considered it significant. We tend to believe that one of the biggest dangers of giving children fiction to read is that they will confuse the inventions of novelists with actual reality; indeed, most arguments for censorship of children's books are based on the assumption that children will model their behavior on that of fictional characters because they are gullible enough to believe that all fiction accurately describes reality. Yet these children seem to have had the opposite problem—they seem not to have realized that some books can indeed actually be about real life, so that they needed to be taught the significance of a connection between what's in books and the world outside of books, the world in which we live. Given the overall character of children's books and also of children's television and movies, however, I suspect that these children are anything but unusual. The would-be censors are wrong: children who have been raised on a steady diet of the books that children usually read and the TV that children usually watch are not likely to have reached the conclusion that books can and do describe the world which we actually perceive with our own senses. Not only is most children's entertainment fiction, but even those books and TV shows which announce themselves as non-fiction actually describe a world that never has existed and that never could exist. Indeed, it seems to be quite deliberate that the non-fiction we produce for young children is indistinguishable from fiction. Too many adults believe that facts about the real world are basically uninteresting, and that learning about them is basically boring. Consequently, we like to "make learning fun"—and in doing so, I suspect, we inevitably imply that it isn't actually fun at all—or else why would we have to work so hard to make it seem like fun? So children learn the not-so-well-hidden message that the act of thinking is inherently boring from books designed to make it seem to be anything but. Such books, and just about all non-fiction television and film for children, almost always also include fictional elements. They actually are fiction. In children's non-fiction, it's never just, "Here's some interesting information about electricity"; it's a whole story about how some fictional children meet a fictional magician who takes them on a series of adventures in which they happen to learn about electricity. It's never just a description of history that's interesting because it happened, it's a cartoon involving a time machine. It's never just instructions in making fudge, it's instructions from a fictional talking duck who painlessly introduces fudge-making in the course of slapstick jokes involving falling into the pots and such. In purportedly non-fictional books like Richard Scarry's What Do People Do All Day, the people of the title turn out to be talking hedgehogs and worms and cats. On television shows like Sesame Street and Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, non-fictional information about animals and machines is provided by, and earnest discussions about non-fictional subjects like friendship and shoplifting are carried on by, cartoon images and cloth effigies of frogs and dogs and weirdly fantastic monsters. The common wisdom is that children "identify" with these perversely unrealistic creatures, and thus can effortlessly absorb the non-fictional information that the fictional situation is designed to teach. Why a young human being would "identify" with a talking frog more than with a talking child is beyond me; and if we really...