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Comment by s3graham | Hacker News Reader

Seems fairly uncontroversial to me, but I'm not in the target demographic yet.

Can anyone enlighten me as to why reading Kipling to a child might be considered "recklessness" these days?

I believe the point the article is making is that the "modern" children's books tend to be written explicitly to "facilitate" learning. To me, modern children books read like powerpoint slides; nothing but cloying bullet points thinly wrapped in an artificial storyline.

Too right! In reality, our ability to read co-evolves with finding cool stuff to read.

We learn to read not by memorising the letters, constructing syllables, then words, etc -- but by discovering, for example, Harry Potter.

  "Shere Khan, the Big One, has shifted his hunting grounds. He will hunt
  among these hills for the next moon, so he has told me."

  Shere Khan was the tiger who lived near the Waingunga   River, twenty
  miles away.

  "He has no right!" Father Wolf began angrily--"By the Law of the Jungle
  he has no right to change his quarters without due warning. He will
  frighten every head of game within ten miles, and I--I have to kill for
  two, these days." [0]

Why anyone would deprive someone the thrill of reading short stories like "How the Camel Got His Hump" [1] or "Jungle Book" is beyond me. Kipling fell out of favour because of the "Imperialist" overtones of his writing, a product of the British Empire times he lived in. I can think of another reason: Kipling also wrote what he saw, not what was ideal. Take the above quote from, "The Jungle Book". You have descriptions of how real natural systems work. Surely we don't want to frighten young children with such descriptions of predators and predated?

Yet the same ideas and themes are reported in the media on a sport, business and politics regular basis.

[0] http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=217...

[1] http://www.online-literature.com/kipling/167/

For some parents not enrolling their kids in every possible class (from sports to arts) or encouraging their participation in debate or math clubs is somehow failing to prepare them adequately for a competitive college/job market. The idea that actually stepping back and saying "just one extracurricular per year" might actually be better for your kids is controversial for "helicopter parents".

As for Kipling, I would assume the reference I took (from another critic) was referring to either Kipling's more adult books or reading the Jungle Book to very young kids. As a parent of a 2-year-old who is tired of reading and re-reading most of the very simple books in the young kids' section of the library (I agree with gvb regarding many modern storybooks), I'm inspired to pull out something more mature that I might enjoy more as well.

I like the Mr. Men (& Little Miss) books by Roger Hargreaves. Not just for kids; I still gain pleasure from reading them several decades later. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Men

I'm at one far end of the spectrum, but I was reading Stephen King in 5th/6th grade, read Anna Karenina (chosen myself) in 7th grade for a book report and had read nearly all of Tolstoy's works by the end of 9th grade. My parents never had a punishment for failure, only failures without effort. The idea was to set your goals so high that they cannot possibly be accomplished. It still holds to today for me...when I don't reach the goals I set for myself, I'm not disappointed, I look at how good I actually did do. The only time this is an issue is when coming up with those annual and semi-annual review goals that determine are used to measure if you're going to get a reasonable merit increase or not.

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