Frog and Toad at the Academy: Gareth B. Matthews on how children’s literature goes philosophical

Gareth B. Matthews (1929–2011) inaugurated the study of philosophy in children’s literature by simultaneously arguing (1) that philosophy is essentially an encounter with certain kinds of perplexities, (2) that genuine philosophical perplexities are readily found in many children’s stories, and (3) that many children are capable of appreciating and enjoying them. He wrote 58 reviews of philosophical children’s stories and co-authored a series of teacher guides for using such stories. Following Matthews’ example, others have produced resources recommending children’s stories as stimuli for intergenerational philosophical dialog. In our research, we study and systematize the different ways that Matthews understood children’s stories to go philosophical. Here, we introduce five of those ways: philosophical story irony, philosophical story fancy, thought experiment, philosophical fable, and philosophical story realism. For each of these ways, we define a set of literary elements and describe the kind of philosophical perplexity they invite, illustrating with examples from children’s literature reviewed and discussed by Matthews. We intend our article to shed new light on Matthews’ scholarship, to guide (ourselves and others) in locating some of the elements in children’s stories that occasion different types of philosophical perplexity, and to spark new conversations among philosophers and educators about this promising field.

“I am making myself remember that awful time”: Juvenilia, Hiroshima, and the Politics of Peace

In 1951, Asata Orada, a professor of education at Hiroshima University, took on the grim task of collecting first-hand accounts from children who had survived the atomic bombing of August 6, 1945. Of the over 1000 testimonials he received, he compiled 105 into Genbaku no ko: Hiroshima no shonen to shojo no uttae [Children of the A-Bomb: The Testament of the Boys and Girls of Hiroshima], a book meant to honour the dead and make a bold contribution to peace education. This article argues that children’s writing about the atomic bombing was implicated in multiple, interrelated political projects. The first section examines the writers’ work of navigating the meaning of their survival, as well as Japan’s new pacifist identity; some of the children express ambivalence or even distrust toward this new national script. The second section picks up the more explicit politics that the children’s stories came to represent. The left-leaning Japan Teachers’ Union sponsored two films based on the book, but neither fully achieved the goal of communicating both the deplorable intensity of war and the spiritual imperative of peace to a broader audience. The third section dwells on the extent to which children fought to articulate their grief, and focuses on the unwilling writer, an unusual figure in juvenilia studies. The children were asked to sublimate their pain into the work of peace, but their writing testified instead to an experience that defied articulation altogether, and to a need for resolution that was ultimately beyond their ability or responsibility to deliver. Through Children of the A-Bomb, juvenilia studies can recognize children’s writing as a tool for political action, a site of traumatic memory, and also a fundamentally limited form of communication that could only know the surface of human pain, and leave readers wondering at the soundless depths below.

The Design of Curriculum in Human Education Through Daisaku Ikeda Children’s Stories

Human education teaches students that everyone has value, and each person should embrace their uniqueness, knowing diversity creates richness, not conflict, in the world. It is essential to show teachers concrete examples about how to create an environment where students can practice dialogue skills, develop global citizens’ character, and embrace their individuality. In this regard, our instructional design on human education may help teachers and researchers see the practicability of connecting humanity with K-12 curricula as well as develop a newfound respect for the need for human education.

Representation of Self-Concept in the Collection of Children's Stories from Bobo Magazine

As construction of thought, self-concept will continue to grow and develop following the life experiences, one of which can come from stories. Therefore, this study aims to uncover and describe indicators of self-concept from children's stories. The data was obtained based on ten children's stories from the online version of Bobo magazine published in 2019-2020. This research used the content analysis method with categorization and tabulation until inference was found. The results revealed that Bobo magazine had implied self-concepts in the published stories. Among them, such as self-identity related to the labels attached by other characters as well as the character's desire to be what kind of self; personal behavior related to the views of other characters and figures in viewing their behavior; and self-judgment related to the acceptance or rejection of the character's behavior. Then, the physical self-concept associated with gender and character skills; moral self-concept related to the character's ability to control his behavior; personal self-concept related to good relations between characters; family self-concept related to the character's relationship with his family members; and social self-concept related to the character's relationship with his peers. These findings appear to confirm the representation of self-concepts in Indonesian children's short stories.

The Aeneid with Rabbits: Children's Fantasy as Modern Epic

<p>Despite their apparent dissimilarity, children's literature and the epic tradition are often intertwined. This is seen perhaps most clearly in the frequent retelling and repackaging of epics such as Beowulf and the Odyssey as children's books. If there is potential for epic to become children's stories, however, there is also potential for children's stories to become epic, and a number of important works of children's fantasy have been discussed as epics in their own right. In this thesis, I examine the extent to which writers of children's fantasy can be viewed as working in an epic tradition, drawing on and adapting epic texts for the modern age as Virgil and Milton did for their own times. Looking specifically at key works of British fantasy written post-WWI, I argue that children's literature and epic serve similar social and cultural functions, including the ability to mythologise communal experience and explore codes of heroism that are absorbed by their intended audience. Rosemary Sutcliff's retellings of epic texts for children suggest the ways in which epic can be reworked to create new heroic codes that are a combination of their source material, the values of their new cultural context, and the author's own personal worldview. This potential is further explored through Richard Adams's Watership Down, an animal story that functions in part as a retelling of Virgil’s Aeneid with rabbits. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit uses the tension between epic and children's fairy-tale to examine the codes at the heart of Norse and Anglo-Saxon epic, and suggest an alternative that nonetheless allows for the glory of an epic worldview. Both T.H. White and Sutcliff engage with the Arthurian myth and the Matter of Britain in ways that use children's literature as a starting point for national epic. Finally, C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman each make use of Milton's Paradise Lost (and, in Pullman's case, of Lewis's earlier work) to produce very different fantasies that each look ahead to the end of epic. Cumulatively, these books illustrate the manner in which children's texts provide a home for the epic in a postmodern age in which many critics suggest the epic in its pure form can no longer survive. The rise of scientific empiricism, combined with national disillusionment following WWI, has been argued to have left epic's traditional worldview of myth, religion and the supernatural impossible to be used without irony. Children's fantasy, ostensibly addressed to “an audience that is still innocent” (Gillian Adams 109), allows authors to eschew irony in favour of story-telling, and explore ideas such as courage, honour and transcendence that lie at the heart of epic.</p>

The Aeneid with Rabbits: Children's Fantasy as Modern Epic

<p>Despite their apparent dissimilarity, children's literature and the epic tradition are often intertwined. This is seen perhaps most clearly in the frequent retelling and repackaging of epics such as Beowulf and the Odyssey as children's books. If there is potential for epic to become children's stories, however, there is also potential for children's stories to become epic, and a number of important works of children's fantasy have been discussed as epics in their own right. In this thesis, I examine the extent to which writers of children's fantasy can be viewed as working in an epic tradition, drawing on and adapting epic texts for the modern age as Virgil and Milton did for their own times. Looking specifically at key works of British fantasy written post-WWI, I argue that children's literature and epic serve similar social and cultural functions, including the ability to mythologise communal experience and explore codes of heroism that are absorbed by their intended audience. Rosemary Sutcliff's retellings of epic texts for children suggest the ways in which epic can be reworked to create new heroic codes that are a combination of their source material, the values of their new cultural context, and the author's own personal worldview. This potential is further explored through Richard Adams's Watership Down, an animal story that functions in part as a retelling of Virgil’s Aeneid with rabbits. J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit uses the tension between epic and children's fairy-tale to examine the codes at the heart of Norse and Anglo-Saxon epic, and suggest an alternative that nonetheless allows for the glory of an epic worldview. Both T.H. White and Sutcliff engage with the Arthurian myth and the Matter of Britain in ways that use children's literature as a starting point for national epic. Finally, C.S. Lewis and Philip Pullman each make use of Milton's Paradise Lost (and, in Pullman's case, of Lewis's earlier work) to produce very different fantasies that each look ahead to the end of epic. Cumulatively, these books illustrate the manner in which children's texts provide a home for the epic in a postmodern age in which many critics suggest the epic in its pure form can no longer survive. The rise of scientific empiricism, combined with national disillusionment following WWI, has been argued to have left epic's traditional worldview of myth, religion and the supernatural impossible to be used without irony. Children's fantasy, ostensibly addressed to “an audience that is still innocent” (Gillian Adams 109), allows authors to eschew irony in favour of story-telling, and explore ideas such as courage, honour and transcendence that lie at the heart of epic.</p>

Actualizing hope and joy in K-12 curricula through Daisaku Ikeda’s human education

Purpose: Our study aims to create a framework grounded in Daisaku Ikeda’s philosophy of education for educators and researchers to implement and evaluate human education in the classroom. Research Methodology: We first synthesized the eighteen chapters by scholars involved in Ikeda studies, published in the book entitled: Hope and Joy in Education: Engaging Daisaku Ikeda across Curriculum and Context to discover the main themes in Ikeda’s human education. Based on these themes, we selected six children’s stories developed by Ikeda to design lessons. We then conducted surveys with ten K-12 teachers across disciplines and school districts to explore their perspectives toward humanity and their feedback on our lesson design. Results: Our finding indicates that creating hope and joy in education is inseparable from human revolution, value creation, happiness, the greater self, global citizens, as well as life and death. In addition, the participant’s responses to the survey questions help educators and researchers understand what K-12 teachers look for in order to implement lessons on humanity more efficiently and effectively. Limitations: By no means would we consider our lesson design exemplary or applicable in all different contexts. Instead, we consider these lessons a starting point to continue exploring a better way to teach humanity in school. Contribution: Seeing examples of lesson plans on humanity and learning from K-12 teachers’ perspectives provide an aspect for educators and researchers to use, extend, or expand the present study to bring hope and joy to students in their local contexts.

The Protean Viewpoint in One Hundred Years of Solitude

Point of view is a primary category of narrative, given that other elements such as characterization, description, language, worldview, structure, and genre, if they are to be convincing, need to be consistent with the adopted vantage point. In One Hundred Years of Solitude, where there is little direct dialogue, a polyvalent and multilayered diegesis, where an uncertain narrator recounts what different characters see, feel, and say, becomes a signature technique. According to Boris Uspensky, the “ideological point of view,” defined as the way of looking at the world conceptually, is not explicitly expressed, but found rather at the phraseological level of the narrative—marking a return to rhetorical criticism. “Many years later, before the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that remote afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” From the outset, the viewpoint is marked by extreme shifts in person, character, time, tenses, and space, mapping its polyphony. This polyvalent narrator shifts from character to character, while the phraseology evokes different genres of the marvelous (myth, legend, folk tales, children’s stories, fairy tales, chronicles, travelogues, and ethnographic accounts). This overlay supports the verisimilitude of magical realist narrative. Ultimately the authorial mask is revealed to be Melquiades, himself a protean figure, a gypsy, merchant, explorer, ethnographer, inspired in Don Quixote’s Cide Hamete Benengeli. The narrator’s worldview coincides with the characters, such that no one shows surprise before the supernatural. The ideology appears naive, provincial, rural, primitive, and akin to outsider art, while maintaining a sophisticated technique.

Book graphics in the creation of the plastic artist Liudmyla Kozhokar

The fine arts artist Liudmyla Kozhokar had professional studies in Ukraine: the Arts Studio in Kherson (1975–1978) and the Ukrainian Polygraphic Institute „I. Fyodorov” in Lvov (1978–1983). Since 1984, Liudmyla Kozhokar participates in fine art exhibitions in Chisinau and abroad. Since then, the artist has collaborated with various Moldovan publishing houses, combining publishing with teaching in the field of fine arts. Since 1999 Liudmyla Kozhokar is a full member of the UAP of the Republic of Moldova, and since 2001 – a member of the A.I.A.P. UNESCO, Paris, France. Liudmyla Kozhokar’s works are in the collections of the National Art Museum of Moldova and in private ones in Romania, the Republic of Moldova, France, USA, Iraq, Italy, Germany, Japan, England, etc. The graphic designer illustrated books of different kinds: ABC books, textbooks, children’s stories, encyclopedic literature, etc. Liudmyla Kozhokar perceives each graphic book separately, finding new plastic formulas and stylistic methods, delving into the text and studying it to the last sentence.