Summary of foreign children by robert louis stevenson
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sorry but i don't know because i hvent seen
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“Foreign Children” is written from the viewpoint of a privileged white British child, who considers the lives of children around the world and concludes that his own life is so much better that these “Foreign Children” must wish to be in his place. An adult reader, noticing the naiveté of the child narrator, may read the poem as an ironic critique of the ethnocentrism it portrays. But would a child reader recognize the irony? If not, is the poem at all appropriate for children? Every semester, my classes debate the question of whether “Foreign Children” should still be published, with some students in favor of retaining the poem in A Child’s Garden of Verses, and others of the opinion that it should not be published. In the past, I tried to stay neutral on the issue, being more interested in my students’ ability to think critically about the question than in their conclusions. The experience of reading to my own children, however, caused me to adapt my position to a more critical one. Knowledge of children and their developing literacy can challenge an adult reading of a text, and parenthood is an excellent place to encounter the child reader.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses, first published in 1885, continues to enjoy the status of a classic. Increasingly, though, publishers have opted to publish selected verses from the work, omitting poems with language or ideas that might be objectionable to modern readers. “Foreign Children,” (a poem that begins by asking “little frosty Eskimo” or “Japanee” children “O! don’t you wish that you were me?”) is, not surprisingly, one of the ones often omitted1 (32).