The designation “child literature” has had a restrictive meaning, if not scornful, for a long time, accentuating mote the adjective than the substantive, since it included literary facts which did not correspond strictly to traditional canons, acording to the lecturer of Didactics of Language and Literature of the University of Granada in Melilla, María José Molina García, qho asserts that “that is why certain sectors prefer terms such as literature for children or youthful literature, with which they intend to abarcar include every kind of literature adapted to child evolutionary stages to turn such pejorative shade away”.
According to María José Molina, literature is, socially, a phenomenon that arises and spreads with printing. “Deciphering a code, in this case the linguistic one, does not create readers, it just permits reading. Literature is pleasant depending on the academic and family education that the child receives and the resources and possibilities of accessing to books. In regulated education, children are teached to read (generally when thay are between five and seven years old), and they are urged to develop habits such as intepretative and critical understanding of the material, which allow to recrate the reading matter”.
In the practice, although there are subjects that must be solved such as the advisability and validity of traditional tales and the supposed influence of didacticism in tales and poetry, or the controversial connection between morality and child literature, the fact is that, from years, it has been observed a change in child literature conception, but to para answer the questions -María José Molina says–, “it would be advisable to propose a child literature that gathered all the literary genres and updated approaches according to the new psychological considerations and the results of the experiences in the classroom or other environments”.
Reference: Prof. María José Molina García
Dpt. Language and Literature Didactics (Melilla)
University of Granada
Phone number: 952 698700.
E-mail: mjose@ugr.es
