Indonesian school of Children's Literature?

Few days ago, I had two Indonesian friends come to my room for dinner. Pretty inappropriate though, since my room is always in a mess with lots of books scattered in all eight directions. Luckily, they didn't mind (or probably they were being polite and decided not to say it). One of them started to browse my bookshelf and grabbed Michael Rosen's Sad Book.

"Sad Book?" she asked me.

"Yep! It's depressingly beautiful!"

She skimmed through the book and closed it in the end. "What's the point of having this kind of book? Why should children read this kind of book? What will the children learn?"

At that time, I realized something. My fellow Indonesians still consider children's literature as a didactic device. For them, children need to get the MORAL message from everything they read. If it doesn't have good moral value, the book should be banned. Since Sad Book doesn't have any moral value to learn, my friend will never allow her future children to read it (thus the children will miss one of great children books. Shameeeee!)

That event got me thinking about the paradigm regarding children's literature in my home country. Driven by my curiosity, I went to consult dear uncle Google. "Kajian Sastra Anak Indonesia" (Children's Literature Study in Indonesia) was soon displayed on the textbox. I didn't expect much because I know not many people are interested in this field (especially recalling all their undermining gaze for me).

To my surprise, I found one opinion from Riris Sarumpaet - a children's literature scholar in University of Indonesia, one new book about children's literature (it is released this April! Whooa!), and one online published thesis on children's literature.

I read Riris Sarumpaet's article first. She is quite famous in Indonesia as a literature scholar and has encouraged the development of children's poetry. She deals with children, so she must at least know something. Yet, her statement shocked me. Children's literature is seen as a place to nurture and implant the existing ideology for children. Wait! So that means children are shaped by adults to be what adults want them to be? This really reminds me of what Nodelman (1992) argues about colonization in children's literature. If that is the paradigm, no wonder educational and moral values are still considered IMPORTANT.

Moving on to the review of that new book, I saw the use of structuralist analysis in it. Well, the whole book is based on the structural analysis. Oh, there is an additional point in it, MORALITY. So, basically the book talks about how children's literature should be constructed to effectively convey the moral values. The same thing also happen to the thesis. Structural analysis on several books along the moral values.

Sigh....... No wonder I never know Maurice Sendak or Beatrix Potter before I came to Cambridge. "Where the Wild Things Are" must be considered as non-educative book due to the lack of explicit moral value in it. And Anthony Browne. And Michael Rosen. And many others.

Sigh!