General Directorate of

Culture and Education

Government of the
Province of Buenos
Aires
Undersecretary of Education
Provincial Directorate of Initial Education

Curricular Document No. 1 / 2007

Children's literature in kindergarten

Prof. Lidia Blanco

Children's literature in kindergarten

What do we call children's literature in the 21st century?

Literature for children has come a long way through the history of culture. It always
existed, because adults needed to tell their children their ideas, religious beliefs and
superstitions through fictional forms. This is how the first stories, legends, crazy songs,
lullabies, and verbal games were born. All the peoples of the world have an oral
literature that tells of their wars, their gods, their particular way of creating a family, of
taking care of their children.

Our native peoples are a wonderful source of Latin American history, told through the
legends that give life to imaginary beings that populated their nights of storytelling. This
cultural heritage of our America must be taken into account when talking about
children's literature in our country as part of our cultural integration, our links with other
Latin American countries, our roots.

So we are not going to talk about anything too new, just that in our hectic 21st century,
literature for children has special ways of manifesting itself, because texts go through a
complex path from production in the hands of an artist to their edition and distribution in
bookstores.

Let's try to get closer to a definition. First of all, we can affirm that it is a particular form
of linguistic communication in which a writer makes a story, a poem, a play born from
his imagination. His wish is that many readers enjoy his creation. In order to carry out
your project, you need to acquire knowledge related to the rules of grammar and syntax
of the language that you will use in your production. In addition, they must have
knowledge linked to the history and culture of their own time and past times.

But the knowledge that we must prioritize is the knowledge of childhood, of how boys
and girls play, think, and feel in early childhood. It is not enough to know how to write a
good text, it is also necessary to be clear about who it is directed towards, what
possibilities of closeness readers will have with the story told, with the characters active
in it.

The idea we have today about Children's Literature was developed in the heat of history
and some events more decisively marked the concept of its function in early childhood.
The Second World War (1939 1944) intensely mobilized concern about the
characteristics that children's books should have to contribute in some way to forming
human beings committed to respect for life as a basic concept to avoid other wars in the
future.

The International Organization for Young People's Books (IBBY), founded in Zurich,
Switzerland, in 1953, is made up of associations of professionals linked to literature,
reading and childhood, representatives of different countries, cultures, religions,
committed to an idea: the meeting of children and books. From its birth to the present
day, the IBBY set out a mission clearly stated in its foundations:
∗ Promote international understanding through books for children and young people.
Books expand children's knowledge of other countries, values and traditions. In this
way, they contribute to the development of good relations between nations and
ultimately, peace between them.

∗ Encourage children throughout the world to have access to books of high literary
and artistic quality. The ability to read and become enthusiastic and informed readers
ensures that children have equal opportunity and can overcome the challenges they
face in today's society. Illiteracy is a problem not only in developing countries, but
also, to an increasing degree, in industrialized nations.

∗ Promote the publication and distribution of quality books for children and young
people, especially in developing countries.

∗ Support and train those who work with children and young people with children's
literature.

∗ Stimulate research and academic work in the field of children's literature.”(1)

The IBBY holds international conferences every two years, attended by writers,
illustrators, specialists and editors linked to books for children and young people. Within
the framework of these events, the issue of childhood was taken up again and in the
90's the defense of certain books that could favor the dissemination of human values
that were present in the International Convention on the Rights of the Child was
accentuated.

In our country there are different associations related to the promotion of children's
literature books:

◊ ALIJA (Argentine Children's and Youth Literature Association) headquarters of IBBY in

Argentina.

◊ CEDILIJ (Center for the Dissemination and Research of Children's and Young People's
Literature) with a center in Córdoba.

◊ CE.PRO.PA.LIJ (Patagonian Propagation Center for Children and Youth Literature) a

venture of the National University of Comahue.

The aforementioned organizations take up the topic of childhood and adolescence as

one of the fundamental thematic axes related to literature and reading and their
productions are of social and cultural interest for all Argentine teachers. Many concepts
socialized among the attendees and members of these entities are present in the current
reflection, and in our country we have important specialists, critics and theorists who
introduce new perspectives and seek to build a better childhood in the promotion of
reading campaigns. happy, eliminating the social and economic differences that give
those who have the most better opportunities for personal, professional and social
development.

What is children's literature for in early childhood?

Literature books present an imaginary world in which the protagonists act according to
guidelines only valid within the fictional text. And this convention is immediately
discovered by children, even very young ones. Animals can talk, think, make decisions,
they dress like people, they react with behaviors similar to those in the human world.
Anthropomorphism is legendary, it was present in the oldest fables of Aesop, and later in
La Fontaine and Samaniego.

Nowadays, this desire to find humanized animals continues in the selection of toys in
early childhood: bears, mice, tigers, wolves, and lions are sold in toy stores and children
choose them and take them to bed as pets. almost alive, they talk to them, they shelter
them. It is natural that they also enjoy these characters when it comes to opening a
book and seeing these friends from their games drawn and starring in stories.
Identification with the character of the literary text is the starting point for them to want
to listen to it, talk to it, and sometimes invent new adventures of their favorite hero.

So children relate to literature as part of a playful attitude in the world, as another game
that is now present in the teacher's voice, or in a film, or in a book with pictures. This
selection criterion was considered valid based on research on childhood that opened the
doors to a type of literature removed from didactic or moralizing canons. That is to say,
when children clearly appeared as people, as subjects of law, the production of books
that really provoked the DESIRE TO READ in them intensified.

The most attractive literary characters are therefore those who play, those who break
the established order, those who venture and discover Other Worlds, suffer vicissitudes,
but come out of those circumstances successfully. The forest is attractive, but the Wolf
does not have to eat anyone as punishment for daring to stray from the path. Children
like imaginary beings, flying dogs, mice that go to the moon on a kite, snails that freely
take off their house. In a word: exaggeration, the fantastic, the definitive breaking of
the boundaries of reality.

Literature and games

The 60's represented a profound intellectual revolution in the concept of the child's bond
with the literature book. The assessment of children's fantastic thinking in the field of
pedagogy and psychology allowed us to review the function of reading literature in
childhood. The new perspective produced a displacement of the didacticism that had
characterized the first half of the century and that gave the literary text the function of
“teaching something useful.”

Gianni Rodari, pedagogue and author of children's stories, appears in Italy. He wrote
“Grammar of fantasy. Introduction to the art of inventing stories ” (2) in the early 1970s.
His work defends the freedom of the child to produce his or her own images, to recreate
reality and to be nourished by literature full of play and fantasy. Author of “Stories by
Telephone ”, “ The Fantastic Góndola”, “ The Flying Cake ” among other titles, his work
as a writer covered the field of fiction and pedagogical reflection on children's books.

Rodari values the processes of identification with the characters and situations of fiction.
While reading, the child pretends to be an orphan, an adventurous pirate, a cowboy, an
explorer. Read to play with words according to your desire and the whims of your
imagination. Rodari condemns children's books that are servants of school mandates,
written to transmit an idea, knowledge, a norm. These books do not serve to train a
reader, and cannot be considered a vital part of a children's library.

“The child, during his growth, goes through a phase in which objects serve him above
all as symbols. It is the phase in which the symbolic functions of language and play are
instituted to become components of personality. The work of the writer for children is
linked to this phase, to such functions. Substantially builds objects for the game; That is,
toys made of words, of images, also of wood and plastic, but they are toys. “They have
the eternity of the ball and the wrist.”

“Defining the book as a toy does not mean disrespecting it at all, but rather taking it out
of the library to throw it into the middle of life, so that it is an object of life, an
instrument of life. It does not just mean setting limits. The world of toys has no limits,
the entire world of adults is reflected and interfered with in it, with its changing reality
.”(3)

The first steps on this path towards a language that liberates the child's playful energy
were taken in Argentina by the author María Elena Walsh, expelled from the public
school environment during the military dictatorship (1976-1983). His literature, strongly
linked to the tradition of English rhymes and nonsense, generated a line of production
that received many rejections in the most rigid areas of public education.

María Elena Walsh, poetizer of children's speech, activated the game with language,
raised the curtain so that a studious cow, a traveling turtle, a watering can that
reinvents its content in the hands of Felipito Tacatún appear before the children's eyes.
And that fictional world paved the way toward truly children's literature, detached from
its moralizing role.

Children's literature in early childhood

Children's relationship with literature begins in the first months of life. The ancient
lullabies are testimonials of a human knowledge that was not born from the academic
field but from the most human of human beings, from the emotional, from the need to
get close to the baby to feel it and let it share the emotions of the child. adult who rocks
him.

This sublime initiation into the poetic word will continue its course as the child grows
and comes into contact with story books, collections of poems, ditties, and rhymes.
These practices of linking with literature are currently considered essential in the
construction of children's subjectivity, a powerful weapon in the defense of their integrity
in the face of society, the indispensable scaffolding to build symbolic capital, a source of
autonomy and critical thinking.

Where do we want to direct it? Towards your training as a reader of literature in this
present and in your future. About the magic of the literary work and its effects on the
human subject, researcher Marc Soriano reflects:

“This everyday wonder, whose external signs are extreme attention and distraction,
produces a very intense pleasure, one of the few that culture has invented.”

“As soon as the reader masters the mechanisms of reading, he can isolate himself when
he wishes, build step by step a universe in which he feels at ease, deny and abolish, for
a certain time, the real world.”( 4) .

This is the central idea that runs through our vision of the importance of literature in
children's lives. The selection of the material that will be offered to children in
Kindergartens will be impregnated with aesthetic, pedagogical, ideological criteria and
also the representation we have of the teaching role in the institutions.
When choosing... what criteria can we take into account?

The word “ criteria” has great resonance in the educational field. In this case and in the
case of children's books, we will use the word in its simplest sense, not restrictive or
authoritarian. We can even replace “criteria ” with “ looks ”, and ask ourselves this
question:

What do we have in the “eyes” inside to accept or discard the books that we are going
to offer to the children of the Initial Level?

The aesthetic value of a children's literary work

Literature speaks of things that move, that stimulate thinking about what is happening
to us, that brings smiles or tears, and that leaves as the only teaching, that contact with
the word that opens a new world, unknown perhaps, before. read that text. It belongs
to the field of artistic creation in which there are no established molds. The plot of a text
responds to the very intimate knowledge of its creator, and no academy in the world can
teach that knowledge.

When the writer is truly an artist, he places the images and the poetic word first,
working tirelessly on each expression until he finds the right form. He says things, but in
such a way that his voice reaches the depths of the human heart.

If a piece of writing only tries to explain a concept in a rational way, it is unlikely to be

literature. It is a text, but not literary because its intention is to inform the reader about
a specific topic. A book that describes the way fish feed, for example, is undoubtedly a
book that belongs to the discipline “Natural Sciences”.

Let us evoke as an example these verses by Federico García Lorca, master of the poetic
word:

The wrong afternoon was dressed in cold.

Behind the glass,

Turbidly, all the children see a yellow tree turn into birds.

The afternoon is lying

along the river.
And an apple blush
trembles on the roofs.(5)

When we close our eyes, we can see an afternoon dressed in cold, and everyone will see
their own afternoon, just as that landscape hits the reader's interior. Who could doubt
the perfection of this image that endures through time when its author is no longer with
us?

Pedagogical care or the invisible presence of the reader.

But the certainty of good writing is not enough, because it is necessary in our case to
think about the particular way in which young readers will enter that linguistic universe.
The level of language used by the author brings closer or distances potential readers.
How will your communication with two- and three-year-olds be most effective? And
those who already have four or five, what differences do they have with the previous
ones?

Teachers are often concerned about the appearance of words of little circulation, since it
is assumed that children do not know them and will not understand the meaning of the
story or poem. However, nothing pleases a child more than hearing a word for the first
time, asking about its meaning, hearing a satisfactory answer. It is not the “difficult”
vocabulary that should worry us.

And where will we look?

A big issue is the syntactic organization of the narrative text. Very long sentences, with a
large amount of information packed together, do not allow easy access for the listening
child. Texts for the early years, which are the ones we are interested in here, must
transmit ideas in a colloquial way. But this does not mean that there is no depth, deep
thoughts.

Another aspect is the writer's representation of childhood, his knowledge of the way
children can enter fiction. This knowledge is achieved with good bibliography, but also
with real contact with the interlocutors.

Pedagogy also gives us tools to know the thematic centers of interest at each
evolutionary stage, and allows us to know that they change over time, and that they can
be a constant even in different cultural contexts. So we know that babies are more
attracted to stories in which a child's character and a familiar object come into play - a
ball, a bird, a butterfly - or a female figure that they can associate with their real or
substitute mother.

As we move forward in time, we find children of two or three years old. At this age they
enjoy stories in which more characters intervene and the events of the story happen in
spaces that they like to explore: the square, the carousel, the sea. That is to say, there
is an interest in outdoor spaces where an adventure can occur in which they can feel like
protagonists. They frequently choose characters who dress up and deceive others, and
playful situations in which the adult is no longer present.

Children aged four and five are inclined towards magical or supernatural elements, such
as those that appear in traditional stories. Curiosity is born for more complex topics: love
within a couple, sexuality, births, death, adventures in strange places, and any story in
which the protagonists move away from family guardianship and go through difficulties
on their own. or threats from the outside world.

We can observe that there is a transition from the baby's absolute dependence on the
adult world to the incipient autonomy of children when they reach the age of five, prior
to the beginning of primary schooling. And this natural transition is reflected in these
trends by a certain type of literature book. But be careful: we will never have definitive
formulas, because no two children are the same. What they are all alike, at any age, is
the immense pleasure that stories give them that transport them to a different world,
with provocations to their imagination, their smile, and also their most hidden emotion.
They like, like the adult reading public, to be amazed.

Children's literature can accompany the child reader, help him and accompany him in his
development. Also stimulate him in the search for realities different from those that
occur in his life and to think critically about his reality and that of the world in which he
grows up. For this to happen, the literature book must get its questions right, its
searches, which are in it, they simply are, waiting for that book that satisfies it with
some answer.

The representation of the World: ideas, beliefs, cultural values.

This is the most complex component of children's literature. No writing is innocent,
especially not that which is addressed to early childhood. Every literary work contains
within it a representation of the World, an evaluative scale on human behavior. In this
space, controversies tend to be intense since, as is known, we do not all share the same
codes regarding what is right or wrong, neither now nor in the distant past. A very
vulgar phrase is valid: we are all different, and the problem is how we learn to respect
each other in those differences.

Children's literature, like the rest of the works of literature, shows a wide variety of
encounters and disagreements of ideas sometimes expressed in a simple story. In
“Cinderella” a young girl appears who is mistreated by a cruel woman, who prevents her
from attending a ball to find...the prince of her dreams! The conflict is resolved through
the intervention of a wonderful, magical fact. The fairy arrives, turns her into a beautiful
woman, well dressed appropriately, and there she goes, to seek happiness. And he finds
her in the blink of an eye, because just by crossing a few dances with the beautiful
prince, the love story is formed. The text states that beauty and good clothing is the
only guarantee of finding love. Will this be true?

The search for a freer society, closer to nature, without extremist ideologies, makes the
adult transmit his concerns to the reader-receiver of his work, perhaps in an attempt to
warn and raise awareness, in which, deep down, There is a great feeling of guilt towards
the world of adults who need young people to change little by little some erroneous
principles that they have established.
The reader will feel like the protagonist of many stories he reads: bewildered by what is
before his eyes, worried about the future he inherits and hopeful with the idea of not
making the same mistakes as his parents.

Extracted from the article “Literature with values” by Ana Garralón. Literary critic and Spanish
writer. Published by La Mancha Magazine No. 17. November 2003. page 7

Books, readers and libraries at the Initial Level

*Library for babies.

45 days to two years.
The Baby Library allows the knowledge of literature books with a simple structure, and
specially designed for young children who attend a Kindergarten. From the second
semester of life, the child may become interested in reading images, as long as they are
attractive due to their color and design. We will not know exactly the degree of
understanding of what the image represents, but it is common to observe in the baby
autonomous attitudes towards what he sees drawn, which allow us to affirm that he
does indeed behave like a reader. A ten-month-old baby can observe and make sounds
of recognition of the object represented, he already knows that this is not the object
itself, but its graphic representation, and this certainty makes him a reader of those
images.

For this age stage - three months to two years - we currently have an immense amount
of offers of literary material with designs consistent with the manipulation possibilities of
young children. Cloth, plastic and laminated cardboard books with rounded ends so that
they do not get hurt.

It is also possible to make it by hand using cuttings of brightly colored fabrics that can
be arranged in the form of a book. Each sheet of fabric is a page on which the
craftsman's creativity will place silhouettes that represent a flower, a rabbit, or perhaps
an apple. The intense colors catch the child's attention and in these contrasts of figure
and form they will look for meanings that may or may not coincide with what is
represented.

We can select picture books that do not “tell” a story, but that invite readers to explore
the illustrations, and this practice is attractive to discover a universe of colors and
shapes that are not necessarily familiar or do not inhabit the world. from reality, they
are characters from literary fiction

But literature is also present, the first stories, which appear with brief narrative
constructions grammatically designed for babies. In these very simple literary forms, a
central character is likely to appear: a child, a bear, a mouse, who must resolve a small
conflict. Humor, nonsense, and play predominate.

In a process that varies for each child, the book offering will advance with longer and
more complex sequences, with more characters. The reading task will represent new
efforts to relate each moment of the story, the spatio-temporal succession, and the child
can be guided to observe that what happens on each page is linked to the previous page
and the next.

Libraries in the Garden

For children of three, four and five years old.

Kindergartens, classrooms for 3 to 5 years old, today try to offer classroom libraries with
good material, young books, with mobilizing, humorous, or emotional and tender stories.
Others, however, promote reflection on painful topics, such as death, poverty, and social
exclusion. All themes are suitable for children, all without exception.

In these first years of life, frequent reading, and permission to touch books, establish a
habit, even if the word bothers us, and forces the shelves to be constantly updated as
readers get to know them. The day will also come to go to the Children's Book Fair, and
those who are already trained will look for places to sit and read, although in this first
reading stage, reading is usually the action of inventing what flows from the images and
establishing associations. with the word of the adult who at some point has transmitted
the content expressed in the writing.

The Library of the room must be a dynamic place, and its frequentation should not be
given over to the improvisations that were common in the Kindergarten of yesteryear.
Going to the “corner” to read is a paradox. The Library gains prestige when the teacher
has planned what he will do with the children in that space of the room. Your role in this
case is observation and participation in the reading scene. Children learn from their
teacher to take books carefully, to leaf through the pages, not to damage them with
hasty movements. When the teacher accompanies the reading, the children learn that
this act is as important as music or art class, in which they are not left alone; it is usual
for them to be accompanied because each activity is a learning experience. Going to the
Library to look at the books, to invent what they can say, is also a learning situation, and
requires pedagogical attention.

The truly dynamic Library should always be associated with reading, storytelling or
exploration by children. That is, activities related to literature must have an assigned
place, a defined space within the room, no matter how humble it may be. Sometimes a
couple of drawers, a dividing curtain, modest pillows perhaps contributed by mothers or
grandmothers, will be THE LIBRARY for children, and will never be associated with a
“corner.”

And... what happens in first grade?

The articulation that builds a bridge between the Initial Level stage and primary
schooling is still difficult, complex in all areas, but today we are especially concerned
about reading. A child who has become accustomed to reviewing literature books by
himself, perhaps still with precarious ways of decoding, but with autonomy, should not
notice differences when he enters first grade. We know that is not so. Sometimes there
is a lack of material, other times the teacher is not prepared to maintain the classroom
library with the same pedagogical criteria that existed in the 5-year-old room.

The expectation is that primary school sustains and gives continuity to the reading
acquisition process initiated in the Initial Level and a contemporary conception of
childhood and reading is essential, so that old, boring, destructive school practices, with
impositions, are not repeated. arbitrary decisions about what should be read and even
worse, about what the reader's appropriation process should be like.

Purposes
∗ Spread Children's Literature by our Argentine and Latin American authors.
∗ Prioritize the literature produced by the native peoples of America: popular stories,
legends, traditions, games, couplets, lullabies.

∗ Train autonomous and critical readers capable of differentiating true literature from
mediocre products on the market.

Goals
∗ Differentiate authors by their writing style.
∗ Recognize the characteristics of traditional genres of literature: short stories, novels,
poetry, plays.

∗ Expand the vocabulary related to literature: parts of the story, characters, narrative
sequence.

∗ Enrich the everyday language level with new forms. (Poetization of oral and written
 language).

∗ Provide new linguistic forms that enhance oral and written communication.
∗ Establish relationships between different works of literature that include common
elements in their structure or theme. (Ex. Legends of native peoples; Narrative
related to the issue of gender or human rights).

Contents
Literature has not been created to teach content. Literary discourse is basically
subjective, it responds to the intimate and deep views of a creator. Nothing that is told
in a story is true, therefore there is nothing to “teach”. The transmission of content
corresponds to informative, instructive, or descriptive speech. Each literary work is in
itself a “content”: its artistic meaning.

Jorge Luis Borges used to say that literature “is not taught, it is shared.”

(1) International Board on Books for young People . Zurich.1994.24th Congress of

Children's and Youth Literature.Seville Spain.
(2)Rodari, Gianni. Grammar of fantasy. Introduction to the art of inventing stories . First
Edition in Italian: 1973. First Spanish Edition: November 1976. Editorial Avance.
(3) Rodari, Gianni.” Imagination in children's literature . "Article published in Piedra Libre.
Magazine of children's literature. Year I. No. 2.1987. pages 5 and 6.
(4)Soriano, Marc.” Literature for children and young people. Exploration guide to its great
themes .” Trad.de Graciela Montes.Ediciones Colihue.1995.pag.374.
(5)García Lorca, Federico.” Butterfly of the air .”Buenos Aires.Colihue.1987.
ANNEXES FOR REFLECTION

Annex l.
Literature and Human Rights

Marc Soriano(*) was one of the most prestigious researchers in the field of children's
literature in Europe. Italian by origin, he developed his work in France where he
interacted with other children's literature professionals and specialists in the subject of
reading pedagogy. His vision of children, young people and books has had a unique
impact on specialists in the area who work in Argentina and his work is used in teacher
training in teacher training courses and teacher training courses.

“Children's literature for children and young people ”, a book that shows his laborious
work with culture for children, was published for the first time in 1975 and then
constantly updated around different topics related to literature, reading and children. His
research shows that the study of children's literature is always a task in progress, an
expression of the social fabric, of its actors, a terrain of agitated struggles, of tacit
debates, a game between the imaginary and the real, between the subject and his time.
Currently we have the translation and notes by the author Graciela Montes.

His death occurred when he had completed updating the work from which the following
fragment on literature and children's rights has been extracted.

“The information technology revolution, unemployment, large urban conglomerates,

misery and wars have disturbingly increased the number of children left to their own
devices or abandoned, who survive by digging through garbage cans, begging or
stealing. They group together in gangs, as in Bogotá, Rio de Janeiro or Bucharest, and
they tend to be attracted to drugs, which help them forget their misery.

In Latin America, the landowners cynically exploit this defenseless workforce, imposing
painful work on them, without time limits or social protection, as happened in France
under the reign of Louis Philippe, in the brilliant years of the industrial revolution (a
scandal that was denounced in 1842 by the famous Villerme report).

Various testimonies have coincided in revealing, thirty years late, that, at the end of
the Second World War, thousands of English orphans were deported to Australia and
other British colonies and used as labor for heavy work, which exceeded their strength.
But that is not all. In Thailand or the Philippines, parents, driven by poverty, sell or rent
their children to certain businessmen and are generally aware that in this way they are
sending their sons and daughters into prostitution. There are 200,000 children of both
sexes in prostitution in Bangkok and 800,000 in Thailand; 40% of them already have
the AIDS virus. The Thai government never opposed these practices in the last twenty
years, arguing that “sex tourism” was one of the country's main resources; Only since
1993 does he seem to have begun to question this foolish policy.

Reality shows us a childhood that is overstretched, abandoned, threatened, violated and

lost... Can children's literature be uninterested in this violence that millions of children
endure? If so, it would be abandoning its universal vocation and directing itself - under
the pretext that its vocation is recreational - to the children of the privileged and
protected classes.

Certainly, the child has his duties towards his parents, his siblings, his classmates, his
teachers and society in general, but, like the Third Estate on the eve of the French
Revolution, he also has his rights that They are often silenced or violated.

You have the right to have a family, a roof, sufficient food. You have the right to receive
information and education, no matter what the color of your skin. You have the right to
have your body and physical integrity respected and you have the right, finally, to
education and training in accordance with your abilities and tastes, which will allow you
to find work in the future.

These rights have been defined and grouped in the declaration of the rights of the
child that was promulgated by UNICEF in 1989 and later adopted by IBBY, but only nine
countries have ratified it to date. One of the objectives of children's books could be to
remember, simply and without vehement or intentional harangues, that childhood must
be respected and protected, since if the child is the son of man, it is no less true that
man is in turn son of the child.”(1)

(1) Soriano, Marc. Literature for children and young people. Exploration guide to its great
themes . Translation and notes by Graciela Montes. Ediciones Colihue. 1995. Page 423
(*)Marc Soriano was Professor of Philosophy, doctor of Letters, member of the French
Resistance, Grand Prize of the French Academy. His book “The Tales of Perrault”
earned him the Saint-Beauve Prize.

Annex II

Literature and literacy

Without a doubt, Emilia Ferreiro is a familiar name, recognized by all professionals
linked to education at the Initial Level. However, it is interesting in the current conflict of
budget reduction that the Argentine Public School is suffering, to mention some of its
concepts about the quality of literacy in times of economic crisis.

“ Literacy how and for what? Can we continue to think of rudimentary literacy for some
and sophisticated literacy for others? How should the right to literacy be considered in
the context of other primary rights? The right to health means (among other things) the
right of every individual to updated medical care, in accordance with scientific and
technical advances in that professional area. The right to literacy cannot mean less than
that. However, just as we see differentiated health care being clearly designed in the
Latin American region according to social sectors (“first class” health care, offered in
highly expensive private institutions and poor quality care offered in hospitals, public),
we see an exactly similar trend being designed in the educational area: the public school
is increasingly deteriorated, impoverished and technically outdated, while private
schools (whose level of quality does not always coincide with what is declared) multiply.

In reality, what is happening in health and education is part of the general trend
towards privatization that is observed in almost all countries in the region: the State
delegates most of its obligations to the private sector and retains only those of a welfare
nature. for sectors whose purchasing power does not allow them to pay for a necessary
service. The notion of “right to health, to housing, to education” thus loses its global
meaning. Instead of citizens demanding a right, it is presented as if it were normal for
citizens to “buy services.” “Those who cannot buy them must settle for State assistance
action that is limited to providing the minimum necessary (and very often below the
minimum required) to maintain the subsistence levels and degraded social functioning
of that segment of the population .” (1)

The insufficient participation of the state to obtain significant improvements in the

reading education of children in developing countries constantly appears in the
Children's Literature Congresses held in our country. Writers, illustrators, and specialists
insist on the need to demand better educational policies regarding the dissemination of
reading and the proper equipment of school libraries.

Authors of children's books have also made valuable contributions to the subject and
their word deserves to be known and disseminated in the field of public education.
Graciela Montes cannot fail to be mentioned and her nourishing thought calls us to
reflection:

“What are the ideas, fantasies and expectations that our time places in books, in
reading, in reading scenes (if it places any)? Why do we find it so necessary to go out
and preach that reading is good? ?

On the one hand, it cannot attract attention that we do it, that we go out to defend
reading, since we live literally immersed in the letter. Our world is a written world,
although there is a threat of extinction of what we call “readers” and “reading.”
Reading, you read - you have to read - many things, from a poem, a novel or an essay,
to newspapers and magazines, manuals, encyclopedias, dictionaries, a brochure, the
shopping list, the telephone directory, the train schedule, the computer screen
indications, catalogues, indicator and advertising signs, letters, utility bills, labels, the
menu of a restaurant, various inscriptions - engraved on the stone or glued to the
refrigerator door -, recipes or chemical and mathematical formulas. The path of the
letter until now has been overwhelming and irreversible.

Illiteracy is decidedly fatal, unfair and exclusive in a writing society like ours. It is said
that this is being overcome and that, in five more years, there will no longer be
inhabitants on the planet over the age of ten who do not know how to read and write.
Will we then have an equivalent number of readers? We all know that not necessarily.
We have all talked and heard about functional illiteracy, illiteracy, in which the practice
of reading and writing, reduced to the instrumental , progressively loses meaning and
atrophies. So, although being a reader implies being literate, apparently not all literate
people are readers.”(2.)

(1)Ferreiro, Emilia. Literacy. Theory and practice . Ed. Twenty-first century. 1998. Page
178.
(2)Montes, Graciela. “The world as a riddle ”. Lecture at the Reading Congress.
Montevido. April 2001.