That judgment looks pretty stupid today

In children's literature there is always the cry among some that books for children should be relevant, should reflect the lives children lead. This desire for relvance is always in harness to some social theory or policy solution, most often one which has little substance, factual basis, or popular support. While there is some tenuous intellectual appeal to the idea that children ought to be able to see something of themselves in books, it not a position with which I have great sympathy. At what time have children's books ever reflected reality? I suspect the value of books is more in expanding their knowledge of what is different and their concept of what is possible than it is in validating what they currently think they are experiencing. In a post that is about changing American social and sexual mores, Walter Russell Mead observes, apropos relevance:

. . . in my youth divorced people could not remarry in an Episcopal church. It is hard to think of anything you can’t do in an Episcopal church these days and other denominations seem to be drifting down the same gentle slope. (It is, one must note, odd that the fewer moral demands a church places on its members, the fewer people bother to come. Many of the relaxations in moral discipline were intended to make the church more ‘relevant’: that judgment looks pretty stupid today.)