Access to truth by Nigel Pearn
I grew up reading rubbish and then reread it all again when I got older and called it nostalgia. Rubbish is great. The most lucid (and mercifully brief) account of rubbish reading I have read is Peter Dickinson’s ‘A Defense of Rubbish’. He wrote it for Children’s Literature and Education in 1970, but a version is available on his website (www.peterdickinson.com). Children, Dickinson argues, need to have access to a ‘whole culture’ in order to build an authentically owned spectrum of value. They also need to have a sense of belonging, and a shared culture of rubbish reading may play a role in this. At one level, adults need to let children discover rubbish and non-rubbish for themselves rather than always prescribing and rating their reading. I am maintaining a dutiful sense of irony as I type this.
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