By Anita VoelkerÂ
TÂhe holiday book-buying season is upon us and for those who have not heard, Canadian independent publisher Pamela McColl has updated Clement Moore’s 1823 poem, “ 'Twas the Night Before Christmas,” by deleting two lines regarding Santa’s pipe and its ubiquitous cloud of smoke.
McColl, an anti-smoking activist, hopes her version of the poem will deter children from smoking. Although the recent publication of this bowdlerized version of “ 'Twas the Night before Christmas” has become fodder for comedians, I am not amused.
This event resurrected an incident that occurred as one of my Messiah College student-teachers read “The Tale of Despereaux” by Kate DiCamillo to her fourth-graders.
As she shared the scene where a father, cigarette in his clamped mouth, sells his daughter, she looked up to find 24 pairs of horrified eyes upon her. She paused, recognizing this was troubling.
Wisely, she created time for conversation. She assumed that the children were disturbed by the selling of a child. But, in whispered unison, the children warned their young student-teacher that the word “cigarette” is forbidden at their school.
They insisted that she replace the word “cigarette” with “chicken.” Strikingly, a man with a chicken in his mouth made a strange substitution, but the children were surprisingly satisfied and seemingly unfazed that a child was being sold by her father ... as long as he was not smoking.
I am not an advocate of smoking, nor am I receiving a kickback from the tobacco industry, but I grieve the loss of this small six inch paper-wrapped bundle of nicotine. Not for what it was, but for what it represented.
I anguish over what other images also will be erased. What other truths discarded?
To those who care deeply about children, I offer an alternative: Rather than eliminating images or words that offend, advance the notion of information literacy alongside critical literacy for children.
The American Library Association uses the term information literacy to describe a set of skills needed to find, retrieve, analyze and use information. Shenk, an emeritus professor from Columbia University, warns that we enter dangerous territory when members of society, including children, are not equipped with the ability to use information literacy.
Much like information literacy, critical literacy is a stance that enables readers to consider text and images, not simply at face value, but through historical, cultural and political lenses.
According to Patrick Shannon, professor of education at Penn State University, critical literacy encouraged readers to use the question “Why are things the way they are?” as a mediating tool.
Imagine what would be gained if parents discussed why things are “the way they are” as they read a book together. In the case of Moore’s poem, parents could locate the 1823 copyright date and share how medical research about smoking occurred well after the poem was published. My hunch is that many 21st century preschool children have viewed images of their great-grandfathers, great-grandmothers or other relatives smoking cigarettes or pipes inside the yellowed pages of old photograph albums.
I would hope that the children would not consider their ancestors to be evil or dim-witted because of a cigarette or pipe. But rather I hope children will be apprenticed in how to situate an image or text within the historical and cultural context of the times.
I believe in children and their ability to think critically. I also recognize that some might consider my reaction to one deleted pipe and wreath of smoke as unnecessarily radical.
But I cringe at the possibility of children living in an unreal utopian world where images that do not fit the current culture are erased. Children do not need us to artificially sanitize the world. Quite frankly, we cannot.
However, children do need us. There is no doubt about that. They need us to show them the past, even if it was shrouded in smoke.
Then we can teach them how to find perspective. In doing so, we offer our children a much more useful gift: the ability to read and think critically. In the process, they might create their own, better future. Â
Anita Voelker is an associate professor of education at Messiah College.