“Dumbing Down”: Why Children’s Books are Being Simplified And What This Means for All of Us

By John E. Mitchell

Consider these sentences:
“There was once upon a time . . .
‘A king!’ my little readers will shout together.
No, children you make a mistake.  Once upon a time there was a piece of wood.”
– beginning of Pinocchio, 1882

“There was once a poor woodcarver named Geppetto who made fantastic clocks and music boxes and every kind of toy you can imagine, each one a work of art.”
– also the beginning of Pinocchio, 1978

The latter, less playful words belong to a Walt Disney book adaptation of the movie, Pinocchio, which is itself an adaptation of a novel published in Italy in 1882. The movie, released in 1940 and followed by decades of related paraphernalia, ensured that the puppet Pinocchio would be legendary in the world of children’s fiction – not as Italian writer Carlo Collodi’s greatest creation, but as another notch in Mickey Mouse’s magic wand.

This process of simplifying – and popularizing – classic children’s literature has been called “dumbing down.” The term was mentioned most recently in regard to the wildly popular Harry Potter books, in which American publishers replaced certain British terms with Americanized equivalents, so as not to trouble the apparently easily confused American reader.

Is children’s literature being dumbed down? The answer isn’t always clear, but the evidence that something is happening lies on store shelves around the country.
“They have these My First Little House on the Prairie books,” laments author/illustrator and Emerson College Writer-In-Residence Lisa Jahn-Clough. “And that’s ridiculous because that is rewriting them and trying to introduce them at an earlier age, and I think that takes away from the Laura Ingalls Wilder books.”

Plenty of similar works, including William Joyce’s Santa Calls, have received the abridged board-book treatment. Most Richard Scarry books are routinely abridged, cut and pasted, rewritten and redrawn. Margaret Wise Brown’s Color Kittens has been redrawn and edited in recent editions. When you add to this the proliferation of substandard original works, especially in the Young Adults market where Goosebumps and Sweet Valley High sell serialized fourth-grade reading levels to teens, along with countless media tie-ins – thank goodness that all they’re doing to Harry Potter is changing Briticisms.

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