Posted on 01/10/2009 12:22:33 PM PST by reaganaut1
As Julia L. Mickenberg and Philip Nel document in Tales for Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Childrens Literature (New York University, $32.95), Marxist principles have been dripping steadily into the minds of American youth for more than a century. This isnt altogether surprising. After all, most parents want their children to be far left in their early years to share toys, to eschew the torture of siblings, to leave a clean environment behind them, to refrain from causing the extinction of the dog, to rise above coveting and hoarding, and to view the blandishments of corporate America through a lens of harsh skepticism. But fewer parents wish for their children to carry all these virtues into adulthood. It is one thing to convince your child that no individual owns the sandbox and that it is better for all children that it is so. It is another to hope that when he grows up he will donate the family home to a workers collective.
Mickenberg, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Texas, Austin, and Nel, a professor of English at Kansas State University, have nonetheless found 44 texts that attempt to attach children to social justice permanently. As they note in an introduction, the tentacles of the left reach deep. Crockett Johnson, creator of the innocuous-seeming Harold and the Purple Crayon, was an editor at The New Masses, a Communist weekly. Syd Hoff, known for Danny and the Dinosaur, wrote for The Daily Worker. Environmentalism is more or less explicit in such crowd pleasers as The Lorax by Dr. Seuss. In fact, so permeated is childrens literature by progressive ideals that Mickenberg and Nel were forced to narrow their scope by focusing on texts that have fallen out of print.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I think they are influenced, not determined. You can Google "genes political orientation". Having a Y chromosome (being male) was a predictor of voting for McCain in this election. He almost split the vote among men but was crushed among women.
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