During the Lump's short tenure in the local public education institution, she developed some struggles with reading. Being a small school in a federally-designated "frontier," said institution lacked the resources to provide diagnostic and remedial action(s) unless the child in question was failing to read at grade level. Since our children all have an abundance of raw horsepower, the Lump was able to compensate, and therefore was unable to get the assistance required to reach her full potential.
"But wait," one might say, "Aren't their laws in place to require all children receive necessary assistance?"
Yes, but unless everyone is willing to nationalize all teachers for military-style deployment regardless of the individual teacher's wishes, mandates will never be truly enforceable. So instead the "necessary" in "necessary assistance" gets redefined to prioritize certain students over others.
So the Shieldmaiden and I were on our own to troubleshoot the problem. One of our first steps was to get her eyes checked. The doc took a look and informed us that our daughter lacked the muscle tone to hold focus at a fixed distance. Furthermore, she told us that she sees this quite often, because in the American on-size-fits-none traditional education model, reading is pushed at a younger age than is compatible with many children's eye muscle development.
So we got her reading glasses, and she was suddenly able to read beyond her grade level. Eventually, the Shieldmaiden and I pulled her out to homeschool. We really should have done that sooner, and spared her some learning trauma. Even home, though she still primarily stuck with larger-print books.
Which brings us to violence in literature. How? Because this Christmas, we decided to try to help our daughter level up her reading by getting her a Kindle Paperwhite so she could blow up text and choose fonts to her heart's content. She's probably swiping 6-12 times per actual page of text, but her reading has exploded. The first book she tried was Robin Hood.
Howard Pyle's Robin Hood. From 1883. And written in pseudo-Middle-English.
The Shieldmaiden and I take our kids' instruction and well-being seriously, and therefore, our movie selection for the kids up to this time has been pretty much 1950's-1970's Disney classics. As a result, our daughter had only been exposed to the Robin Hood legend in the form of animated foxes. So as my girls and I sat in the chair the other day perusing our respective books, the Lump spoke up and said, "Wow. This is violent!" Followed a few minutes later by, "So much violence!"
The Dot just shrugged and said, "So? I read Redwall books."
The Shieldmaiden's Christmas book was Hogfather, by Terry Pratchett, who observes that all the classic stories are bloody.
Later on they took the blood out to make the stories more acceptable to children, or at least to the people who had read them to children rather than the children themselves (who, on the whole, are quite keen on blood provided it’s being shed by the deserving*), and then wondered where all the stories went.
*That is to say, those who deserve to shed blood. Or possibly not. You never quite know with some kids.
Indeed, I'm quite surprised by the sudden objection to violence, given that the girls used to take almost perverse delight in asking for the "gory stor[ies]" during our nightly Bible reading. Second only to King Solomon's wisdom, and that was mostly because I read the climax in my best John Mulaney impression (NSFW&K).
Of course, said desire for gory stories predated the short stint in the public education system, so perhaps that's what explains it. The US public education system is rather notorious at this point for it's zero-tolerance policies against violence. Indeed, when a kid can get suspended for how he eats his pop-tarts (and judges uphold that suspension), one might be forgiven for calling them zero-sense policies. So perhaps a year and a half spent in an environment that eschewed any discussion of violence as possibly positive in any context is where this aversion to even thinking of violence (or physical contest, even).
Of course, the answer is more adventure books. Though the girls' current shared love of Nancy Drew might not be the best, since she has an alarming propensity for getting kidnapped.
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