Meta-Supremacy Strikes Again

So there's this thing that's been going around Mastodon that's making the white, middle-class membership of the Fediverse go all weepy. It's this:

Declaración universal de los Derechos de los niños a escuchar cuentos

Now ignoring the utterly cringe-worthy wording of even the title[1], which (for those who don't speak Spanish like, say, me) in English says, according to DeepL, “Universal Declaration of the Children's Rights to Listen to Stories”, there's a whole lot to unpack in this short document. I've put the DeepL translation at the bottom of this rant so you can follow along.

I should be clear before I start that I'm not opposed to the ghost of the idea that's behind this pile of glurge. As such I will be making some specific recommendations at the end to improve it. But first I'll have to start unpacking this perfect example of left-flavoured white supremacy.

Universality

The “declaration” is termed Universal, meaning the declarers consider it to apply to everybody around the world. This is further cemented by the name of the organization publishing this “universal declaration”: the International Storytelling Network.

Inconsistency

Item 1 says that it advocates the “most beautiful stories from all the oral traditions of the world”. And then proceeds to cite not a one. There's not a single Russian or Saudi or Iranian or Indian or Bangladeshi or Vietnamese or Chinese or Innu or Kazakh or Turkish or Georgian or Tanzanian or Ethiopian or ... and the list goes on and on and on ... author or story cited anywhere else in the document. This is quite arguably the single most grotesquely offensive part of this document (and the largest motivator in me writing this rant).

So why is there not a single non-Eurosphere author listed in section 5 among “all the books, stories and poems” whose authors adults are “obliged to make available”? There's eight writers cited, all of whom are in the Eurosphere, most of whom are, I'm guessing, Spanish or Portuguese (I can't really tell apart by names, sorry), and not a single person from outside the, putting it bluntly, white European world. Not one.

Referenced stories

The referenced stories in section 10, where I recognize them through (bad) translation, are purely white European in origin. Of the two I don't recognize, one of them might possibly be African in origin (but given the tenor of the rest of the list it likely isn't). I'm not going to recite the list of nations above again. Just scroll up and read the list again and ask yourself where the folk stories from these nations and hundreds more! might be.

Cultural values

This phrase in section 1 is a killer to me: “... especially those that stimulate the child's imagination and critical thinking”. This is for a few reasons.

First, an incoherent, meandering list of ten vague “universal”, “international” declarations is not exactly a good place to be talking about stimulating critical thinking. Someone needed to apply a bit of critical thinking to this list before shouting it out to the world.

Next, there's this bizarre assumption that stories which stimulate a Eurosphere child's imagination will stimulate all children's imaginations where the truth is far more likely that many stories that are in the cultural background of the Eurosphere, with its Biblical-based moral and cultural assumptions, are going to cause confusion and incomprehension rather than stimulate imagination.

Lest you think I'm imagining this and that story appeal is universal, one problem I had when teaching English to Chinese students was precisely that storytelling style in China is very different from storytelling style in Europe and descended cultures. Most notably the children were very uncomfortable that there was no moral to be taken from the story attached at the end. It was disquieting to them that the desired “lesson” to be taken from the story was not there. I'd spend half a class explaining how to discern the moral indirectly by analysis only to be told that this was wasteful when the writer could have just said it. They, in short, didn't get their imaginations stimulated by the stories because the stories were alien in structure (not to mention content).

Finally, the cultures that value harmonious coexistence and communal effort are not going to exactly agree with individual imagination and “critical thinking” as a goal. (Are they wrong to not value individual critical thinking? Not our place to decide for them!) For a “universal” declaration it's looking mighty white and middle class. Thus a lot of popular western stories, which seem to hinge upon the solitary hero fighting the status quo will not parse. The result of people from these cultures reading them will once again be bafflement and disquiet, not imagination and critical thought stimulation.

Translation

The “International” Storytelling Network apparently isn't sufficiently international to actually translate the document with native speakers. Instead they give a hook into Google Translate, a site that is absolutely God-awful at translation of anything that isn't whatever it is that nerds are interested in this week.

If you're an “international” group and you're making a “universal” declaration ... where are the proper translations?! Diving around that web site I see people from all over the place registered as members of this network. Why haven't any of those stepped up and provided a translation of the declaration? (Here's a hint: many of them likely wouldn't want to given the contents...)

Sheer silliness

So let's look at some (and I stress some) of the silly parts of the declaration:

2 ... the full right to demand that his parents tell him stories at any time of the day.

Any time of day?! So in these people's worlds children don't have school, apparently, and adults don't have to work, both of which, to be even marginally productive at, require restful sleep in advance.

3 ... the absolute right to ask the adult of his/her choice to tell them ...

The absolute right to demand stories from any adult? What!? If some child walks up to me when I'm going about my day and “demands” a story, I'm going to look around for the parent or guardian and give them one Hell of a tongue-lashing! Part of this is because it's presumptuous for anybody, child or not, to tell me how I spend my time, and part is because children need to learn at an early age to respect others' boundaries, not intrude upon them with demands. Do you want to raise a generation of narcissists who believe their every demand should be catered to by everybody around them at a whim? 'Cause that's how you raise such a generation! (Just ask the Chinese and their “little emperors”...)

4 ... the right to listen to stories sitting on the lap of his grandparents.

Flirting with cultural values again. Grandparents aren't the indulgent, child-spoiling crowd in all cultures. In some they're the disciplinarians. Or they're the ones keeping the household in order while the parents labour twelve hours a day. Or they're ... you know, anything but someone who can just stop, put a child on the knee, and tell stories. I'm sorry if it bothers you to know this, middle-class, suburban western woman, but in a lot of places people work hard until literally the day they die. There's no universal privileged class of people who can just sit around and tell stories on demand by virtue of age.

7 ... their parents are in the obligation to decontaminate them [ed: of television] leading them by the ways of the imagination of the hand of the hand of a good book of infantile stories.

The idiotic anti-technology vibe is noted and rejected. There is quality television and there is crap television. Not all kids are interested in books, much like not all kids are interested in, say, caterpillars. Stop forcing your very middle-class, very white values on everybody else! If children are motivated to tell their own stories based upon what they see on television let them do it, dammit! Just because you're a Luddite (as am I: I don't watch television) doesn't mean you get to inflict that stance on everybody else in the world!

8 Adults have the obligation to nourish themselves permanently with new stories, their own or not, with or without kings, long or short.

Not all adults have skill in making up new stories, nor time in memorizing them. Again, only the white middle class in the Eurosphere systematically has a parent who can afford that much time to do things like this.

All this silliness is where I know that this declaration is absolutely the product of white, middle-class people (probably women). For only in this world is the conceit conceivable of making story-telling the absolute centre of every child's life. But even from this perspective some of this is ridiculous.

Sillyness: bafflement subsection

6 Every child has the full right to know the fables, myths and legends of the oral tradition of his country.

I am genuinely baffled here. Where, precisely, are they finding places on Earth where children are not permitted to know their cultural fables, myths, and legends? I've lived on a rather sizable fraction of the planet's surface and have never, not even once, encountered a place where this is true.

7 The child has the right to invent and tell his or her own stories, as well as to modify existing ones, creating his or her own version.

Same question here. Where on Earth are they finding cultures that prohibit children from inventing their own stories?

BE DECREED AND PUBLISHED

I'm hoping this is an artifact of bad mechanical translation because otherwise this is just so over the top and pretentious it deserves nothing but derision.

So how can this be fixed?

As I said at the top, I like the idea that's at the core of this declaration. I just think the execution is woefully inadequate, bordering on being simultaneously offensive and silly. So here are some specific recommendations.

DeepL Translation of original source document:

Universal Declaration of the Children's Rights to Listen to Stories

Compiled and adapted by the International Storytelling Network

  1. Every child, without distinction of race, language or religion, has the right to hear the most beautiful stories from all the oral traditions of the world, especially those that stimulate the child's imagination and critical thinking.

  2. Every child has the full right to demand that his parents tell him stories at any time of the day. Those parents who are caught refusing to tell a story to a child, not only incur in a serious crime of culpable omission, but they are also condemning themselves to the fact that their children will never ask them for another story again.

  3. Every child who for one reason or another has no one to tell him/her stories, has the absolute right to ask the adult of his/her choice to tell them, as long as he/she does it with love and tenderness, which is how stories should be told.

  4. Every child has the right to listen to stories sitting on the lap of his grandparents. Those who have their four grandparents alive can pass them on to other children who, for various reasons, do not have grandparents to tell them. In the same way, those grandparents who do not have grandchildren are free to go to schools, parks and other places where children gather, where they can freely tell as many stories as they wish.

  5. Every child has the right to know who José Martí, Hans Christian Andersen, Elena Fortún, Lewis Carroll, Elsa Bornemann, Carlo Collodi, Gloria Fuertes, María Elena Walsh, among others, are. Adults are obliged to make available to children all the books, stories and poems of these authors.

  6. Every child has the full right to know the fables, myths and legends of the oral tradition of his country.

  7. The child has the right to invent and tell his or her own stories, as well as to modify existing ones, creating his or her own version. In those cases of children very influenced by the television, their parents are in the obligation to decontaminate them leading them by the ways of the imagination of the hand of the hand of a good book of infantile stories.

  8. The child has the right to demand new stories. Adults have the obligation to nourish themselves permanently with new stories, their own or not, with or without kings, long or short. The only obligatory thing is that these stories be beautiful and interesting.

  9. The child always has the right to ask for another story, and also to ask to be told the same story a million times.

[ed. The translation failed badly on the next section and I had to insert a few guesses of my own for what stories were being referenced where I recognized them. Where not figured out I left the translation as-is with an appended [?] to mark it.]

  1. Finally, every child has the right to grow up with the adventures of Alice, Little Red Riding Hood, of “Uncle Tiger and Uncle Rabbit” [?], of that little donkey called Platero [?], of Puss in Boots, of the bunting of fairy tales [?] and of the immortal “Once upon a time...”, magic words that open the doors of imagination on the road to the most beautiful dreams of childhood.

BE DECREED AND PUBLISHED

[1] I sincerely hope it isn't as cringe-inducing in the original Spanish as it is when translated to English!