Adults get upset over really stupid things and at the same time laugh at how sensitive children are. Children crave adventure and excitement and don’t break down if they sometimes get a little scared.
In elementary school, it was told that Civilization began in Kaksoisvirtanmaa. Now we have ended up in the land of double standards – and maybe soon we can consider the end of civilization.
Or that we change the wrong words in old children’s books so that – my God why didn’t we come up with this before! – the world would change for the better, and at the same time we buy a cell phone with earth metals dug up by children.
Or that making porn is elevated to a great career path, and porn consumers are frowned upon.
Is it any wonder that such a middle-aged liberal at a tender age often thinks that this can’t get any more idiotic, but it always can.
In the new versions, for example, there are no cashiers, but they are researchers. It is indeed relevant to the extent that grant researchers nowadays earn more or less the same as cashiers. It is also not allowed to say that someone was fat, but only that he was huge.
…well, the Norwegian witches were pretty bad. But such is life. Nowadays, there seems to be a strange idea that children can’t be told what life is like until they turn 35. At that point, the information might come a little late. And of course, at the same time, all children have cell phones with which they can access any porn and violence site, waiting for adulthood, when it’s hard to hear the harsh truth about life.
If a child is upset by Roald Dahl’s texts, it is because there is something wrong in his life. His parents, for example, don’t really deal with parenting, but are as confused as Norwegian virtues.
And besides, it’s not the child who gets shocked or grows crooked by these texts. Shock is in the minds of adults.
The children are of course under guardianship, but the goal is that they will not be under guardianship for their entire lives. Children are supposed to grow up to be adults, and they won’t become adults if they don’t understand at some point that there are all kinds of misery and evil in the world – like the star of Africa, that signpost of Finnish colonialism.
And hey! This does not mean that children should be told everything as brutally as things really are.
But there is a limit to naivety.
*Roope Chest of Drawers*
*The author is a children’s author whose texts could be changed a lot, but that should have been done already at the writing stage.*
You can discuss column 6.5. until 23:00.