Not a book but the 90s children’s cartoon series “Captain Planet” is a show a lot of people don’t think is propaganda but it 100% is. The base concept is pretty standard for the time, the Spirit of the Earth assembles a team of teen superheroes to fight the “decay” harming the Earth, mainly pollution, overfishing, cutting down forests, corporate greed, the standard 90s kid lessons.
But then the show had some really REALLY out there episodes, such as the episode where you find out overpopulation is a global threat and literally ends with the show telling the viewer their families should only have two children max, and the one that features the Israel/Palestine conflict and says that whole thing could simply be solved it both sides just talking it out.
It was Ted Turner’s baby and you can tell since it really reflects the weird “90s Coastal Liberal” views he had.
This one is available on-line.
Hollywood actually attemped to make it into a movie, but it mutated into a game show about winning a million dollars. (This isn’t the worst tone shift in Hollywood proje ts.)
Some Japanese kids textbooks present a un-nuanced view of what being Japanese means. “Japanese people eat rice and fish”. The unstated assumption there is that this is what distinguishes Japanese people from others. Stupid, but it goes unchallenged and thus remains in many heads into adulthood.
Childrens books in English have been very racist against african americans. I’ve seen them from the 20s and 30s. Speech, names, hairstyles: all degrading propaganda.
When I was a little kid in the 1960s, my grandmother was still reading Epaminondus and His Auntie (1907) to my siblings and me. She figured it was a classic she had read to her children in the 20s and 30s, and couldn’t see anything wrong with the title “pickaninny.”
The stories are basically folklorist “Fool Tales,” in which a good-hearted child (or adult) takes instructions too literally and melts the butter, drags the daily loaf through the mud, kills the puppy, etc. More recently the Fool was whitened up and turned into Amelia Bedilia.
The Tale of Little Black Sambo is too good a story to lose; children love to hear about a small boy outwitting the terrifying tigers, and especially out-eating his parents at pancake time. Luckily, a 1990s version called Little Babajiswitched the background from Africa to India — where tigers live, anyhow — and offered non-racist illustrations of the Indian family. And some very funny tigers. It was one of my kids’ favorite bedtime books.
Just to clarify, Sambo always took place in India (though sometimes the illustrations made that easy to misunderstand) - that’s why it has tigers and bazaars and ghee. The author lived in India for decades and was writing a story about the place she lived.
As a counterpoint to the pro-racism books of our past, one day at the library I picked up a slew of books to read to Kid Cheesesteak who was about 4, one of them was Ruth and the Green Book
Somehow I had grown to adulthood without know what the Green Book was.
So, I’m reading him a story of Ruth and her family’s road trip in their brand new car. She’s so excited at the beginning, and it unsurprisingly gets into grim territory as they travel into the Jim Crow south.
Several books have been written to indoctrinate children on the perils of being vaccinated and the joys of infectious disease, most famously “Melanie’s Marvelous Measles” by Stephanie Messenger.
To be more precise about what nearwildheaven says in post #69, the Agatha Christie book that is being talked about was originally published in the U.K. under the title Ten Little N-------- and in the U.S. under the title And Then There Were None (in 1939 in both countries). Even in 1939 American publishers knew that the British title was offensive. The title remained the same in the U.K. until 1977, after which it became Ten Little Indians. The last use in the English language of the offensive British title was in 1980, when an Australian edition was published under that title. The last use of Ten Little Indians was in a British edition of 1985. After that it was only published in all English language editions as And Then There Were None. (Editions in other languages are a further problem.) So the problem was always that British publishers didn’t seem to understand the offensiveness of the word (and Agatha Christie was never very sensitive to racial matters).
Hell, the English were still using the term on television Up through the 1970s. One episode of Fawlty Towers had the Major explaining the difference between “wogs” and “n——-s.”
Besides, “And Then There Were None” is a MUCH better title.
I am more than well aware of that Green Book, but it was, of course, not a propaganda book. The first thing that popped into my mind when I saw your post is Qaddafi’s political manifesto, which was absolutely forced upon children.
Speaking of past dictators, in the old country I clearly do remember a grammar book from 1st or second grade from a prestigious Catholic school had, all of the sudden, a picture and sentences about how great Generalissimo Francisco Franco* was and that we all should salute him. Peculiar because it was not in Spain but El Salvador, but not so strange when considering how conservative the elite Catholics were there.
My mother added in my book (after I did not need to take it with me to 3rd grade): “God save us from Franco”.
I do remember back in the days when tonsillectomy was often considered a rite of passage in childhood, and the books which made it sound like an adventure. I understand why the books were published; it was to make the children less afraid of what was going to happen to them. Now that the procedure is no longer routinely done, I’m seeing less of this, as a library volunteer.
