The Stupidification of our Youth

We had parent teacher conferences on Tuesday. Of course, Diva and CJ are lovely and the teachers love having them in class, so there are no concerns there. The thing that concerns me is the kind of books they are putting out there for kids these days.

After conferences, I took Diva up to the Book Fair so she could pick out a new book. She quickly grabbed one with her favorite toy du jour, and we were on our merry way. I figured I didn't have anything to worry about, because I remember all our book fair books being the Cadelcott Award winners and things like that.

But when I got home, I was sadly disappointed. This book is TERRIBLE. I mean it's a cute premise and the general idea is good, but the vocabulary is atrocious! There are abbreviations of words that don't even make sense. And when it talked about best friends having sleepovers, it said that those times were great for LOL'ing. WTF?

Is that were we are headed? Do we need to start dumbing our kids down to speak cyber-lingo at the age of five? No wonder foreign schools are so far ahead of us developmentally!

I guess it just seems like the general quality of a lot of things has gone downhill as of late. Like the Powers That Be are more obsessed with putting out 10 loads of crap so they can sell as much as possible than they are with making sure what they get out there for kids is good quality story telling. I think of the dad in the movie Elf and how he wants to ship out a book where the last two pages are missing just because it will save them the cost of having to reprint the books.

And maybe I'm foolish to think that everything at a book fair should be of a higher calibur, but good Lord, it's SCHOLATIC! Scholastic should at least be. . .well. . .scholarly. Not like you're letting a 10 year old explain to a 5 year old what to expect now that she's got a BFF. Arrgh!

Perhaps what's bothering me the most is the fact that it's just making me feel even O-L-D-E-R than I already do.

What do you parents think? Have you noticed that the calibur of books has decreased in the bast 10 years? If not, what kind of books are you reading to your kids?

Also, there was a book that I loved when I was little, it was all done in black & white. You would read the story one way, then turn the book upside down and finish reading the story. It was super cool the way the pictures would change and was a really cool city story if I remember correctly. Do any of you remember a book like this? I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the book, so if someone else remembers it, PLEASE help me!!!