More Overbearing Parents Out to Destroy the World

[Kara]

Asshat

This woman makes me furious. Sure, everyone likes a happy ending, but let's face it, life doesn't work that way in many cases. Is it so wrong to give kids a little taste of reality? The good guys don't always win. Or they do win, but the cost is too high. I'm not saying we should only expose kids to the books they're trying to ban, but there isn't a damn thing wrong with a balance of both sides.

TALK TO YOUR KIDS! Stop trying to let TV/books/school/whatever raise them instead.
Keeping the pretend tragedies and violence away from them WILL NOT protect them from the real tragedies and violence in the world. And this will make them that much more unprepared to deal with it when they encounter it for themselves.

[Broomjockey]

"Make your bonfire from bad books"?
Sig Heil!
Hell, that ever gains ground, I'd make it my mission to get books with unhappy endings and seed them around where kids hang out. Get them hooked when they're young. "Psst, hey! You! With the wiffleball! I got something you're sure to like. Fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm. First tale's free."

[XCashier]

[Harriet Cox, librarian for Norfolk's School Library Service] said: "It's patronising children if there are only books with happy endings and they will see through it because they know there's good and bad in the world."

True. Life isn't all sunshine and flowers, and pretending it is will only set your children up for a fall later. This book-banning mum clearly has a chronic case of Cranial-Rectal Impaction Syndrome.

[blas]

My high school had a "Read a banned book week". One of my assignments senior year was to pick one book from a list of hundreds of "banned" books and read it.

Did you know at one time, Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn books were banned or were attempted to be banned? Classic American literature?

What the feck people.

[AnaKhouri]

Uh, if your KID is reading "Wide Sargasso Sea" your family has bigger problems than sad endings.

Seriously, kids aren't stupid. My mom teaches kids that have been through things I squirm to think about, and even in my (relatively) good childhood, I still understood bad things happen to people. And cutting out the end of "Stone Fox" won't traumatize them for life, it will only make them more empathetic for the sorrows of others.

Give me a break!

[Acolyte]

Off-Topic:
'Happy Endings Society' sounds like NOTHING to do with books.

Anyways.
This woman is full of crap, and part of this very disturbing trend of trying to insulate their kids from EVERYTHING. Sociological bubble boys (and girls). I know a guy who was super-sheltered growing up. His life right now is immensely fucked up. And we're trying to breed a generation of kids like this...

[Soulstealer]

"Make your bonfire from bad books"?
Sig Heil!
Hell, that ever gains ground, I'd make it my mission to get books with unhappy endings and seed them around where kids hang out. Get them hooked when they're young. "Psst, hey! You! With the wiffleball! I got something you're sure to like. Fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm. First tale's free."

Pfft, the Grimms are the cleaned up version. You want to hear the older ones.

[Broomjockey]

Pfft, the Grimms are the cleaned up version. You want to hear the older ones.

Crap. Did I mix those up again? Argh. Thought the Grimms were the originals. *sulks*

[AnaKhouri]

If the Grimms' versions are the cleaned-up ones, where can I find the originals??? If pecking out stepsisters' eyes and boiling evil queens alive is cleaned-up, I want to see the originals!

[Severen13]

Apparently, that whole "Happy Endings Foundation" thing is a marketing ploy for the Lemony Snicket books:

http://www.inkygirl.com/happy-ending...arketing-ploy/

[Crosshair]

Fahrenheit 451 was a personal favorite of mine. I wanna get a copy of that book made of Nomex.

[Soulstealer]

If the Grimms' versions are the cleaned-up ones, where can I find the originals??? If pecking out stepsisters' eyes and boiling evil queens alive is cleaned-up, I want to see the originals!

The Grimms purposely went out to collect fairy tales from around the country, the people they talked to were inherently upper class (as was their audience) so their nurses tended to clean up the stories a little. There is no one collection for the older ones since it was an oral tradition. It would require a bit of searching since most of the books are based on the Grimms these days and have been clean up more.

[Kara]

May I present:

The Stuwwelpeter. It's a collection of German stories that attempts to keep children from being naughty. It does this by featuring stories of children with bad habits who wind up dead or horribly disfigured.

From "The Dreadful Story of Pauline and the Matches"

So she was burnt with all her clothes,
And arms and hands, and eyes and nose;
Till she had nothing more to lose
Except her little scarlet shoes;
And nothing else but these was found
Among her ashes on the ground.

[CaroPhoenix]

Back in the early 1990s, there was a non-fiction book that came out (and was reviewed by the Washington Post) that detailed all the original versions of the classic "Fairy Tales" by the Brothers Grimm. As in the case of Snow White: The Prince was actually a necrophiliac, the Dwarves didn't care if you were male or female to have sex with.

For the life of me, I can't remember what the book's name was, and I can't seem to track it down. That's the book i want to read.

As a side note, if you like comic books, there is a series of of comics called "Grimm Fairy Tales" by the comic publisher Zenescope. The covers are most definitely NOT kid friendly and the stories within are definitely NOT kid friendly either.

[GingerBiscuit]

There aren't really any 'originals' of fairy tales. The brothers grimm were the first to collect them into written format, but originally they were passed down by word of mouth and VERY gory and sexual. The Grimms cleaned them up and added morals that had been non-existant before. Before that, there were usually as many versions of each story as there were people tellign them.

One version of Red Riding Hood had her jumping into bed with the wolf, quite happily.