Cultural values in children`s texts

Hey dudes,

Today I`ll tell you something about children`s texts and the libraries in the States. There is no real difference between the libraries in Germany and the U.S.: they look almost the same way and are organized similarly. The only difference I noticed was, that the children`s section in the library we visited in Blue Ash was rather big when you compare it to the dimension of the whole library.
I chose two books yesterday: The Oklahoma City Bombing and Ellis Island, both books with a content for children up to 8 years I guess. The books are very different from what I read when I was a child. At that time I read books about technical stuff, or funny books without any real content mostly because I was not so interested in history. Ellis Island by Conrad Stein is truly a nice story about the three waves of immigration to the U.S. and how it changed the country and the people. In fact it`s very interesting to read how the people got into the United States and how their life began here. It`s amazing that almost everyone living in the U.S. has ancestors who had to pass Ellis Island to push to New York City, how it`s called in the text. In this book there are no typical children-paintings or something like that. There are many photos of the time when Ellis Island was famous for immigration. The other book about the Oklahoma City bombing was very interesting with a hard content for children. It`s about the terror atack in the 90s in Oklahoma and about the children hurt there. The story is very hard and sad because so many people died because of one crazy fucked up guy. I think it`s very good to let children know that such sad things can happen and that they can learn about it. When I was a child there were no books about such things for children, I think. In this book there are only photos again. Especially photos of the damaged building and of tired helpers to emphasize how awful this attack was.
I think that all children can identify with the book about the bombing, because all children can be hurt by a bomb, independent on the color of their face. On the other hand not every child is able to identify itself with an immigrant in the beginning of the 20th century because most people who got to Ellis Island came from Europe. So children whose ancestors are from Africa or Asia have problems here.
To sum up you can say that children`s texts reflect the cultural values in a country because children are informed on these values by these books. The children get to know how everything works and what people think about different things. Children`s texts are also good to convey "have to know`s" about the home country to children.

That`s it up for now so hear ya tomorrow,
Sebastian