" A work is tied to ideology not so much by what it says as by what it does not say."
Pierre Machery (1966) A Theory of Literary Production (p.34)
Children's literature is a site for cultural transmission. Books both reveal and are illuminated by the values of the time in which they were written. For example, in Beatrix Potter's the Tale of Peter Rabbit; Peter and his sisters behave in accordance with a set of gender expectations that reflect the nineteenth century, while in Wind in the Willows, mole and his companions would be at home in the Victorian gentleman's club. To illuminate the values that are embedded in a text, trainees might be invited to read and compare an original text with a sequel or reworking such as Jan Needle's Wild Wood with Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows; Robert Leeson's Silver's Revenge with Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island; Jean Rhyss Wide argasso Sea with Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre or Susan Moody's Misselthwaite with Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden. Stephens (1994) suggests that in reading these texts which exist in relation to one another the 'dialogic effect throws the ideology of both texts into sharp relief.' (p. 45)
In an accessible essay, Ideology and the Children's Book, Peter Hollindale (1988) suggests that ideology operates at three different levels within texts:
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Explicit ideology; being the values and beliefs with which an author consciously imbues their work. For example a story that tackles green issues will overtly beliefs about caring for the environment
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Implicit ideology: being the unexamined values -those that the author is unaware of conveying
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Dominant culture: being the widely accepted values of the dominant culture in a given time and place
One of the difficulties in detecting the values located in texts is that we tend to take for granted the 'truth' of our own values, so it is difficult to detect ideological content, especially when it is implicit, in texts where the values are consonant with our own. Such texts appear to express what Althusser calls an 'obviousness'.
Hollindale proposes some key questions for helping readers locate the ideology in children's books
- What happens if the components of a text are transposed or reversed?
- What does the d_nouement tell us? For example, does a happy ending reaffirm values that appear to have been challenged earlier in the text?
- Are the values of a novel presented as a package - i.e. aggregated into virtue or vice or Britishness?
- Do some novels undermine the values that they superficially appear to be celebrating?
- Are desirable values associated with niceness of character? Is it true that an attractive philosophy cannot be held by an unattractive character?
- Does anyone in the story have to make a difficult choice - of behaviour, loyalties etc. in which there is more than one course of defensible action?
- Is any character shown as performing a mixture of roles? Does any character belong to more than one subculture or group?
- Who are the people who do not exist? E.g. characters who are invisible but should be present or those who are not named and only identified by a role.
Having read Hollindale's article, trainees might apply these questions to books that they know well and work in groups to share findings.
Stephens (1992) argues that learning how to read against the text is as important for children as it is for adults. This ability to detect bias is implied in a number of objectives in the NLS framework. For instance, in investigating at ways in which attitudes are conveyed through writing, distinguishing between fact and opinion or locating the use of persuasive devices. It is often assumed that bias is a feature of certain types of non-fiction writing, but it is also an unavoidable element of fiction and it is essential that trainees are alert to the subtle ways in which bias operates in fiction as well as non-fiction if they are to develop children's abilities as discerning and critical readers.
 
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