I wish I had read Momo by Michael Ende as a child instead of at age twenty. I think it has good messages about listening and quality of life.
However, I think the winning strategy—if you can devote enough time to it or are willing to trust your kids enough to let them do it themselves—is to just saturate children with stories of every kind from every source. Almost any story has things you really wouldn’t want to take to heart and most of them have at least a few good things to be taken from them (even if it’s “look, the author wants to promote X, but he does a terrible job at it because even when an author who likes X can control all the variables in a scenario, X still looks really dumb!”).
This is more or less what happened to me growing up—my parents made a modest effort to steer me away from books that were just plain badly written (Animorphs and similar), but otherwise, I read everything that came within arm’s reach and was still interesting after a fair shake of twenty pages or so. This has been a boon not only to my factual knowledge (I know more about history and science, in particular, from fiction than I do from my official education) but also to what I take to be a well-roundedness and openmindedness in my outlook. Although in isolated instances, you get stories that can pull off deep falsehoods without sacrificing highly obvious artistic quality, if you are exposed to enough stories they’ll start to stick out as anomalous.
I think it would also help the saturation method if there were less prejudice towards certain broad types of media. I know a lot of people have blind spots towards, say, comics or video games what have you—for my parents, it was television. I was fond of TV in my younger years and would watch just about anything that was on, but instead of using this proclivity to expose me to well-done TV, they arbitrarily limited my access to the point where I went several years without watching any at all and only now have come to appreciate such informative and provocative shows as House, Babylon 5, the works of Joss Whedon, etc. There is at least some good work being done in any medium.
I went several years without watching any at all and only now have come to appreciate such informative and provocative shows as House, Babylon 5, the works of Joss Whedon, etc.
If you haven’t yet, you might want to check out The West Wing—Aaron Sorkin’s a brilliant dramatist.
I wish I had read Momo by Michael Ende as a child instead of at age twenty. I think it has good messages about listening and quality of life.
However, I think the winning strategy—if you can devote enough time to it or are willing to trust your kids enough to let them do it themselves—is to just saturate children with stories of every kind from every source. Almost any story has things you really wouldn’t want to take to heart and most of them have at least a few good things to be taken from them (even if it’s “look, the author wants to promote X, but he does a terrible job at it because even when an author who likes X can control all the variables in a scenario, X still looks really dumb!”).
This is more or less what happened to me growing up—my parents made a modest effort to steer me away from books that were just plain badly written (Animorphs and similar), but otherwise, I read everything that came within arm’s reach and was still interesting after a fair shake of twenty pages or so. This has been a boon not only to my factual knowledge (I know more about history and science, in particular, from fiction than I do from my official education) but also to what I take to be a well-roundedness and openmindedness in my outlook. Although in isolated instances, you get stories that can pull off deep falsehoods without sacrificing highly obvious artistic quality, if you are exposed to enough stories they’ll start to stick out as anomalous.
I think it would also help the saturation method if there were less prejudice towards certain broad types of media. I know a lot of people have blind spots towards, say, comics or video games what have you—for my parents, it was television. I was fond of TV in my younger years and would watch just about anything that was on, but instead of using this proclivity to expose me to well-done TV, they arbitrarily limited my access to the point where I went several years without watching any at all and only now have come to appreciate such informative and provocative shows as House, Babylon 5, the works of Joss Whedon, etc. There is at least some good work being done in any medium.
If you haven’t yet, you might want to check out The West Wing—Aaron Sorkin’s a brilliant dramatist.
Joss Whedon!