Engineering young souls.

Ball, David

IT IS GOOD that WLT is paying serious attention to children's literature, and the new prize is a fine thing. But the topic seems to bring out the Inquisitor that lurks beneath the benign, literate exterior of many. We need positive minority heroes and strong feminine characters for children, do we? Replace minority with socialist, feminine with proletarian, and we're back to the days of Stalin and his ideological hatchet man, Zhdanov. If writers are "the engineers of souls," as Stalin said, then they'd better build morally good, politically correct books--or else. We have zero tolerance for badly built planes. Conversely, if we believe in the freedom of writers as artists, then the moral nature of their books (whether for children or adults) and the political lessons they imply are quite separate from their value: what counts is whether they're good literature. The jury's out on whether reading good literature makes us--or our children--better people.

David Ball

Smith College