On Sept. 28, Todres was a guest on WABE’s “City Lights,” where he spoke about his book, Human Rights in Children’s Literature: Imagination and the Narrative of Law. “[That Horton quote] is a clearer explanation of core principles of human rights than any legal scholar or philosopher has come up with,” he told host Lois Reitzes.
The book, which he co-wrote with Sarah Higinbotham, who teaches law and literature at Georgia Institute of Technology, is the product of examining about 500 children’s books for the impact they would have on children. He and Higinbotham did not stop at just reading the books themselves; they also read them to children, the target audience, and asked them how they felt about the books.
“They’re seeing human rights ideas in the stories they read and have read to them. They may not be describing them as technical points of law, but they’re describing human rights ethics,” Todres said.
For example, they had adolescents read the story Ferdinand, which is about a bull who doesn’t want to fight. The adolescents, for whom identity is, in Todres’ words, a “big thing,” picked up on the themes of identity and being who one wants to be.
Younger children found those same themes as well. Though they didn’t cite to any specific human rights law, these children consistently found the human rights themes woven into these stories. According to Todres, that is good enough.
“Children’s literature isn’t about teaching law so much as it is about teaching ethics and the foundation of human right,” Todres said. As such, he says, these books are a rich resource.
Human Rights in Children’s Literature also explores how children see themselves as the characters in the books.
“The imaginative world is really powerful for children,” he says; “they happily go back and forth [between imagination and reality].”
These fictional stories have a lot of staying power, exemplified by how even a law student can’t often quote a judicial opinion from a week ago, but can talk all about his or her favorite story when they were a kid.
In their research, Todres and Higinbotham found that more diversity is needed in children’s book. Though children see themselves as these fictional characters, it is more difficult to do so when children cannot find a character that looks like them.
Host Lois Reitzes suggests that this is one of the successes of Dr. Suess. Children can identify with a character like Yurtle the Turtle because he can look like any one of them. Todres adds that Dr. Suess’ books are so striking because everything that is written is also in the image. “It’s empowering [for the children],” he says, “It draws them in.”
Though the research for this book was U.S.-centric, Todres says that this book is the first part of a larger project. He plans to look on more of a global scale, including especially oral storytelling. “There are many places we can go,” he says.
Listen to City Lights Podcast