Biographies for young readers aren’t telling the whole story

What should we include in biographies for young readers? Should we exclude the disputed parts of peoples’ lives? I found myself thinking about those questions as I was reading the January 25, 2008, issue of the Times Literary Supplement, featuring reviews of several new, often critical biographies of Mahatma Gandhi, including two by his grandsons. And I thought about that again as I was recently reading historian Barry Mackintosh’s 1977 article about George Washington Carver in American Heritage magazine, which debunks or undermines some of the myths we’ve heard about the famous scientist.

It’s clear that adult biographies treat historical figures much differently than kids’ books do. Right now, the lives of remarkable men and women are most often portrayed entirely positively in children’s books—and the younger the intended reader, the more this is so. So a picture book biography about Gandhi simply aims to tell young people who he was and what he accomplished. (It’s interesting that there aren’t any picture books about, say, the Nobel Prize–winning Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, who was often critical of Gandhi and had different ideas about the path that India should pursue.) Since Gandhi succeeded in helping India gain independence, perhaps we only need to tell children about his astonishing accomplishments—and skip the controversial aspects of his life—especially since Gandhi’s lesson of passive resistance became such an important part of our nation’s Civil Rights Movement and remains such an inspiring ideal today.

And yet, as India shines today as a booming technological beacon, why not let young people know that some Indians found Gandhi’s insistence on weaving one’s own cloth and sticking to traditional ways and his deeply religious outlook not always in their nation’s best interests? Why not connect the dots between modern Indians (or even with Indians now living in the United States) and the many, often dissenting voices of Gandhi’s contemporaries? Why limit our discussion to his heroism?

The same holds true for Carver. Perhaps portraying him as an inspirational and beloved black scientist is enough for very young readers. After all, as Mackintosh points out, many Americans, both black and white, are content to think of Carver as a religious, modest man, the Thomas Edison of the peanut. In other words, they prefer the myth to the man. So no one looks too closely at what Carver actually discovered and invented—and few question Carver’s claim that his scientific insights were the result of divine inspiration. I’m not aware of a single book for middle or high schoolers that presents the conflicting evidence about his life, that invites students to take a closer look at Carver’s legend. And while he is a hero for many, the contributions of other deserving black scientists, who were more diligent and less colorful than Carver, have been ignored.

Rather than examine famous peoples’ lives or historical movements critically, today’s children’s books often leave kids with little more than legends—George Washington and the cherry tree; Thomas Jefferson, the sage of Monticello, minus any mention of Sally Hemings, the young slave with whom current DNA evidence shows he fathered six children; our nation’s “glorious” Westward expansion, told exclusively through images of heroic whites and savage Indians. The point of overturning these and other myths isn’t simply to set the record straight; it’s to point out that our interpretation of history is constantly being challenged, debated, and revised. The only way we can bring that crucial message to young people is if we risk sharing our doubts about the very accounts they were taught in elementary school. If we do that, students may at first feel like they’ve been fooled. But just as in middle-grade and YA novels that turn fairy tales upside down and inside out, young people will have an opportunity to use what they’ve learned as a baseline to develop new, more accurate understandings—which is precisely what we want.