To the Editor:
Re "For Young Latino Readers, an Image Is Missing" (front page, Dec. 5):
What children read in school matters. Latino students, whose numbers are growing, need to encounter books featuring Latinos. But that's not enough. As the election demonstrated, it's not Ward Cleaver's America anymore.
Our schools are the leading edge of our country's growing diversity. All children need books that recognize them. They need to see themselves as Americans, and as people who can make a difference.
If most schoolbooks reflect the dominant culture, we shouldn't be surprised if students — and parents — feel that school is about reinforcing a status quo that doesn't include them.
I'm encouraged that the architects of the Common Core have been responsive to our concerns about the need to include more multicultural works. As adults, these students will live in and lead an even more diverse society. Their books must pave the way.
MAUREEN COSTELLO
Montgomery, Ala., Dec. 5, 2012
The writer is the director of the Teaching Tolerance project at the Southern Poverty Law Center.
To the Editor:
Encouraging rich and diverse representation in classroom texts is laudable, but suggesting the pairing of Latino characters to Latino students is deeply problematic. Further, by posing the issue as one solely about ethnicity suggests that Latino readers need Latino writers more than white or Asian readers do. We all need a diversity of texts.
Equally problematic, the article seems to work under the premise that reading is the only way we feel represented. Any good teacher knows that interaction with the text through writing and discussion is the way students turn a critical eye toward representation, perception and the techniques of representing yourself or your ideas through text and speech.
We all need those books that the article (rightly) suggests need to make it into class. But diversity of texts must mean diversity of culture, gender, race, class, narrative style, perspective and so many more things. And we all need that diversity equally.
BRICE PARTICELLI
Director, Student Press Initiative
Teachers College, Columbia University
New York, Dec. 7, 2012
To the Editor:
One reason children's trade books for and about young Latinos are in such short supply is that the last Bush administration's No Child Left Behind education policy compelled teachers to focus unduly on test preparation, often to the exclusion of class time devoted to the reading of literature.
Teachers who once kept a shelf or more of children's trade books in their classrooms were sometimes even forced to remove the books for fear of putting unwanted "distractions" in their children's hands.
Publishers, who are risk-averse anyway, witnessed the evaporation of a major portion of their institutional market, and rechanneled their limited resources to produce more books about pink princesses, teenage vampires and the like.
LEONARD S. MARCUS
Brooklyn, Dec. 6, 2012
The writer is a historian and the author of "Minders of Make-Believe," a history of children's book publishing in the United States.
To the Editor:
Yes, when one is a child, it's nicer to read about people who are familiar. When I was a child in the 1950s, living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and learning how to read, the "Dick and Jane" books — with their spotted dogs and white picket fences and single-family frame homes — bore no relationship to my life in a high-rise building with smelly elevators and scary interior stairwells.
I was puzzled by the people in the books and yet intrigued by the thought that there was a different world apart from my world, and maybe more worlds than both of them.
I'm happy to report that I learned to read nonetheless and grew up to get a master's degree in English.
So yes, it would be the icing on the cake to have books with more varied characters. The book itself is already cake, though. It will get you where you want to go: to be a reader.
ANN CALANDRO
Flemington, N.J., Dec. 5, 2012
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