Sara Schwebel and Jocelyn Van Tuyl are utterly wrong about the Newbery Award list. Which is surprising, since they recently wrote a textbook on the topic.
In a buzzword-filled piece for Slate, these authors decided to bring attention to the award’s centennial celebration by trying to convince readers that Newbery needs to purge some of its past recipients, since “your favorite Newbery from childhood may now seem out of touch, hopelessly uncool. Worse yet, it may feature offensive viewpoints and stereotypes.” The authors go on to insist that childhood has changed, that the majority of the list is white-centric, and that Esther Forbes’s Johnny Tremain is somehow racist because its minor black characters aren’t prominent enough. Someone who has “director of the Center for Children’s Books at the University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign” in her bio should know better.
As a whole, the piece is poorly considered and factually inaccurate. For instance, it informs us that “the result was a canon that is overwhelmingly white and often marked by a colonialist worldview. Today, the Newbery’s mission increasingly encompasses an awareness of past failures to think about all children as future leaders.”
First, anyone who has even skimmed through the Newbery list would see that over 30 of the books feature non-white protagonists, five of them deal with medieval times, over 30 of them are not set in the U.S., and nearly 40 have female protagonists. Second, the Newbery’s mission is not to think about “children as future leaders.” It is:
To encourage original creative work in the field of books for children. To emphasize to the public that contributions to the literature for children deserve similar recognition to poetry, plays, or novels. To give those librarians, who make it their life work to serve children’s reading interests, an opportunity to encourage good writing in this field.
Future leaders need formation in the virtues, to learn to treat each and every person with dignity, to master their will, and to grow in courage. Writers exercising their creativity need to recognize that this is not accomplished by shoving agendas at children.
The Slate article goes on to say that the canon needs to change because childhood has changed, that a 50-year-old book has nothing to teach us. There are disastrous consequences with this view, which requires us to jettison history that we dislike and to ignore any and all wisdom of past ages. Not everything that is old is good, but we are very quick to scoff at tradition today, thinking it has no value and no place in our lives. Furthermore, having different life experiences doesn’t mean that themes of childhood, of being human, aren’t universal. Pretty much every girl will tell you that being 13 is tough.
Filled with further overstatements and confused reasoning, the piece is an over-academized mishmash of axioms and fancy phrases meant to perplex and silence readers. No, not every book on the Newbery list will stand the test of time. But those that do will have done so because they speak truth in powerful, well-crafted ways that make us think and inspire us to strive for higher things.