Everyone takes it for granted that children should read books, because reading is a key element of their education. The question is, which area of education? The intellectual? The psychological? The recreational? Their all-round education, perhaps? It is when answering these questions  that disagreements and misunderstandings arise.

It is not easy to evaluate children�s books with universal criteria which are valid for every child. It is neither easy nor in fact advisable, given the tendency to fall victim to moral inquisitors or, worse still, to impositions of well-meaning aesthetic or educational appearance based on adult stereotypes, who in turn read very little, or, quite simply, do not read at all.

 

Instead of offering advice on how children�s books should be, �mistake made by many experts in the field�, criteria should be drawn up to establish �how they should not be�. The first commandment is indisputable: they should not be boring. This does not mean that they have to abide by the usual entertainment standards, for in that case we would fall victim to the banality and noise imposed by other media. Avoiding boredom, where reading is concerned, means stirring interest and curiosity and giving some kind of pleasure to reader.

 

The difficulty in finding the keys which will enable us to access the world of children�s expectations, is obvious, particularly when they are very young. However, children are much more open readers than we think, and when they become engrossed in a book they usually adopt a receptive attitude which leads them to discover things of interest where they least expect to. If, despite this, they don�t like a book, they leave it. It is sufficient to analyse the books they reject in order to be able to offer them another kind of reading material. A children�s book needn�t be lacking in substance either. Borges has already warned us of the danger of puerility, a trap which authors who treat children as if they are stupid often fall into, when in reality what children want is to feel wise, they aspire to discover new worlds and know that that will sometimes be difficult. Provided that they do not come across any insuperable obstacles (pretentious vocabulary, long syntax, excess characters , complex narrative structures), children are prepared to do their bit because they enjoy the dual adventure: that offered by the story and that of their own efforts to understand. Many great authors who have known how to connect with children owe their success to the respect with which they treat them by addressing them as well-educated people.

 

 

Naturally, a child�s development has different literary requirements depending on their age. Publishing houses are used to assigning age ranges to their books, just as with specialised magazines. However, it is advisable to reject any rigid ideas of �timetables�, since many books theoretically written for eight year olds are enjoyed by six year olds or twelve year olds.  Reading is neither a linear nor ascending process, unless we only consider it from an educational perspective.

Teresa Colomer, a children�s literature specialist and author-coordinator of 'Seven ways to evaluate children�s stories ' (Germ�n S�nchez Rup�rez Foundation, 2002) has noticed that young readers are becoming more and more demanding and are no longer satisfied with the books supposedly aimed at their age group. To a certain extent, children�s and youth literature has gone through the same process as adult literature: it doesn�t matter much if it�s fantasy or realist, political or recreational, didactic, sentimental, horror or travel, just so long as it is of high quality.

An author as moralist in his beliefs and as far from unorthodox as J. R. Tolkien declared that �a story is no more than a story, a literary work which aims to produce an equally literary effect�. Which is no mean feat if we evaluate the different functions of  <i>literature</i>; among others: to stimulate the imagination, to understand the world, to discover new horizons, to get to know ourselves, to experience aesthetic pleasure, to enrich language.

In any case, the vast publishing output for young people makes it difficult to always get it right when separating the wheat from the chaff. Guides are required and those that exist are not always reliable. Many specialist publications on the subject favour publishing interests; teachers, who could provide the best advice, tend to give in to the temptation of didactics or everyday laziness; literary critics, for the most part continue to consider children�s literature as �lesser literature�, and pretend not to know about it. Who should we trust then? Well, apart from children themselves, librarians, possibly the most experienced profession when it comes to children�s reading material.