Whereas references to children’s reading in popular parenting magazines in the 1930s and 1940s were made in the context of managing children’s emotional fragility and ensuring their happiness, domestic literacy management in the 1950s revolved around three main tasks: preserving the “culture” of reading in the home, involvement in schools, and regulating children’s reading practices.
Preserving a culture of book reading was considered an important aspect of
nation-building and an antidote to the rapid changes in society that many felt
threatened the normal Canadian way of life. For example, in 1952 Saturday Night
featured an article lamenting the “reading culture crisis”
in Canada,
marked by the perceived decline in children’s and adult’s interest
in reading and evidence of changing reading practices. The author argued that
the decline in reading of the classics and novels was a threat to the “continuity
of human culture”
(Jones, 1952, p. 30). He attributed this decline to
the rising cost of books, to the temptations of more exciting media such as
TV, radio, magazines, and movies, and to parents who did not spend the time
they once did reading to their children, and to the sanitized prose in children’s
school readers whose controlled vocabulary and scientific “readability
indexes”
(p. 29) made reading a thankless chore. Taken together, Jones
argued, these influences left children little incentive to become the “book
worms”
of previous eras. Solutions to this perceived crisis involved a
recommitment “to the reading of great literature”
and the need for
a new crop of Canadian authors to write new “great works.”
Concerns
over a crisis in reading in the 1950s were echoed by Alice Kane in Canadian
Home and School. She linked children’s desire to read books to their intelligence,
and to a new concern among educators and psychologists for children’s
“well-balanced”
personalities.
Do your children enjoy books? Or is reading a hardship to them? Mostly the answer depends on the attitude of the family unit. If the parents read and enjoy their books and talk about them, the children will too. Books are important; children need them if they are to grow into intelligent, well-balanced men and women. (Kane, 1958, p. 1)