Be careful, however, not to shape your conversations about literature in ways that demand definite conclusions for each session or lead to your children feeling manipulated. Trust is crucial for critical family reading. Children will use their own judgement, make up their own minds about the issues at stake, and often understand the messages of what they read in ways that are surprising to adults. The personal closeness provided by serious, non-judgmental discussion, based on shared stories, is as valuable as any specific conclusions you or your children come to.
In one of his previous books, Should We Burn Babar? Mr. Kohl describes his own teaching style:
I defined colonialism and pointed out that the costume of the hunter gave him away as a colonist. Next I gave them some history of French colonialism in Africa, and we discussed the meaning of clothes in the story. There is no reason why a discussion like this shouldn't be part of the critical literature program as early as the third grade, if not earlier.... Finally the issue of what Babar learned from people came up, and to the group it seemed that he no longer liked being an elephant. Thus, not only was he not trying to avenge the death of his mother; in a way he became a friend of his mother's murderers. Franz Fanon described this internalization of the colonists' culture as one of the deepest forms of dehumanization experienced by the victims of colonialism.... The third-graders must have sensed some of this, because most of them expressed anger at the hunter and no longer thought the story was cute or charming.
In the same book, Kohl criticizes the Little House on the Prairie series (offensive to Native Americans) and Pinocchio (sanctions male violence).
