What Educators Need to Do with Biased Children’s Books on Religion, Gender and Race

Abstract

Children’s books from around the world have often provided a more favorable description of the groups holding power than those that are marginalized. Fortunately, today’s children’s books are much improved than those published in previous years and portray minority groups better than ever before. However, some recently published children’s literature can be stereotypical. This article explores the way biased children’s books published in selected regions from around the world describe groups holding less power in society. To illustrate how offensive these resources can be, examples of children’s books from Nazi Germany are discussed first.