This might not be strictly propaganda, but it’s definitely trying to put kids in a certain mind frame.
When my parents first moved to Germany, a neighbor gave my mom a book called Der Struwwelpeter (I still have it). The neighbor said it was required reading for anyone with kids. It was written in 1844. The first english translation was done by Mark Twain.
The basic moral of all the stories is “Do what your parents tell you or horrible things will happen to you!”. The children in the book all die or get horribly disfigured.
My favorite has always been “The Story of the Thumbsucker”.
Mein Hund Klauss I’ve heard that Struwwlepeter was actually made as a parody of children’s books at the time. I’ve never seen any proof one way or the other. If I recall correctly, the author’s hometown has statues of the characters. I imagine the children there have some interesting nightmares.
You should see some of the children’s stories from the Georgian period. They’re almost all about how good behavior leads to riches, while bad behavior invariably ends in a horrible death. The Victorians went one better and defined good vs. bad in more religious terms; only later in the period did things get calmed down a bit, so that pretty minor sins wouldn’t lead directly to the grave. We just don’t read those books any more.
The only propagandistic book I can think of is my Rudyard Kipling’s pocket history of England, which is really something. It has a lot to say about what a great thing the Norman Invasion was, since the Saxons had strengths and weaknesses that were complimented by the Normans, thus producing the wonderful English race. And so on.
A little from Column A, a little from Column B: I don’t really believe it, but I think there are enough parallels, despite Tolkien’s repudiation of allegory, that you could have fun arguing the point.
When I was in my latish teens, I stumbled upon a book called Arrows of the Queen in the Young Readers section of the library. It was a fantasy novel geared towards the middle school set, set in a quasi-medieval milieu. The whole point of the book seemed to be “traditional marriage/family bad, homosexuality and premarital sex (for twelve and thirteen-year-olds :eek: ) good.” Now, at the time, being quite morally liberal, I thought that these ideas were all well and good, but I was so offended by the blatant propaganda that I didn’t bother with the two sequels. Even at age twelve, I think I could have easily seen through the thin veneer of “story”, which was poorly written, to the blatant political message.
My favorite for a long time has been James Clavell’s The Children’s Story. I suppose you could call it anti-propaganda propaganda for children
re: The Story of X —
Aww, c’mon, it was hardly a humorless strident feminist polemic. It was cute and light-hearted and playful. It was an xperiment that cost xactly 23 billion dollars and 72 cents. And it made lots of points about how discomfited people get when they don’t know the sex of the person they’re dealing with (a subject to which Saturday Night Live turned for amusements years later with “Pat”).
Well, the original authors were Stan and Jan Berenstain (not “stein”, a very common mistake), the namesakes and models for the fictional anthropomorphic ursines. Stan was Jewish and Jan was Christian. Some time in the 2000s (aughts) they passed the franchise on to their son, who I suppose is the one taking it in an overtly religious direction.
How old were you when you read it? (Is this poster still here?) Because I was 12, and it seemed obvious to me, as a non-Christian child living in Christendom.
Likewise. I was about the same age, non-Christian, but I was never in any doubt about the Christian theme. It didn’t bother me, and still doesn’t.
I wonder what people have to say about the atheist propaganda in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series? I enjoyed the first two books, but I thought it became silly in the third book.
There’s Struwwelpeter, of course, the classic 19th century German picture book exhorting good little children to eat up all the soup, not play with scissors, nor mock any Africans who happen to be wandering around the neighborhood.
Then there’s Struwwelhitler, in which good little children can enjoy ol’ Schickelgruber getting his comeuppance.
This book briefly became a best-seller after Stephen Colbert mentioned it on his show. The Amazon “reviews” are a riot, although some of the more out-there ones are gone.
For a while, the library I volunteer(ed?) at got a lot of those Rush Limbaugh kids’ books, both paper and audio. The audio books were almost always still in the shrinkwrap, and the books appeared to have never been opened. I also once saw a book at a thrift store about abortion that was aimed at young children, based on its text, and complete with graphic photos. :eek:
As someone moderately versed in Christian theology, it was quite obvious that Pullman is not. A case can be made for atheism but that wasn’t it. Like any other heavy-handed didacticism, it killed the story. But then Pullman beat it to death with a sledge hammer and drank its blood.
When I was a kid in the 1980s, I checked out a book from the public library. I’m sure I selected it purely because it had a picture of a garbage truck on the cover, and I liked trucks. It was a story about a garbage man who started trying to repair and reuse the things people left out on the curb. But ultimately he discovers that it isn’t worth the effort, all that stuff is worthless junk and it really should be taken to the landfill. And the lesson in the end was that garbage is actually good, because it can be used to fill in wetlands (they probably said “swamps” in the book) and then we can build houses on them!
I read *Bread and Dew, *mentioned in the OP. It was the only book from Moldova I could find in English when I was reading an author from every country.
