Author Laura Krauss Melmed Talks about Her Kids Guide to DC
Laura B. Weiss -- School Library Journal,01/10/2007
While many kids may think Washington, DC, is all about politics and government, Laura Krauss Melmed's Capital!: Washington D.C. from A to Z (HarperCollins, 2002)—which just came out in paperback—also shows a town that's bustling with great art, music, food, architecture, and diverse cultures and religions.
SLJ spoke to Melmed about her alphabetic guide to the nation's capital and the challenges of discussing politics and government with kids in today's fraught political environment. Her book, with bright, folkloric illustrations, is recommended for grades three to five.
So why a book on DC?Because I've lived there a good part of my adult life and raised my kids there. I've seen a lot of DC through my kids' eyes. I feel it's everybody's city. Over the years, I've watched the wide-eyed tourists coming and going up and down the mall. People come from all over and they feel, "This is my city."
I'm struck by the fact that you portray DC as a real city in which real people live, not just a place visited by tourists.
There were certain things that were a given. We had to have the White House. It started out with the must-haves. Then I filled in with other places I thought were really interesting.
Some people might consider including the Islamic Center in your book a risky choice in today's political climate.
It [the Islamic Center] was a place that my kids have all gone to in grade school. It's a beautiful building on Massachusetts Avenue. It's a mosque, and it stands out, and I felt that I just wanted to cover it to make the book multicultural. The family that goes through the book is a family of color.
I noticed that you have a Muslim religious institution on the same spread as the Holocaust Museum. Was that intentional?
We really did that on purpose. It's a little subtle wish for peace. We put them in the book next to each other, and we wished the world could be a more peaceful place.
How can educators talk to kids about government when all they hear about in the news is constant partisan bickering?
Things have gotten worse in that regard since I wrote the text for the book. Also, I don't know how much a first or third grader, how much kids of that age look at the Capitol and say, "Oh, those corrupt idiots." I didn't want to get into that kind of level of stuff. I wanted to explain what the Capitol is—what's in there. Political types come and go; hopefully, some of the symbols that are there will remain important to people.
Yes, but kids must be picking up on the level of discord they hear adults having about issues like Iraq.
I tried not to be too rah-rah waving the flag, or "we should go spread democracy to the Middle East." No matter how savvy kids get, no matter how much they are bombarded with things, they're still kids. It's kind of a shame there aren't any heroes anymore.
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| Submitted by: | S I Brown 1/17/2007 10:30:30 AM PT |
| Location: | NY |
| Occupation: | educator |
There ARE heros...kids don't hear about them because of the way events are reported in the news and discussed in schools.
It takes heroic courage to volunteer to go into a war zone. Left-behind families go to heroic lengths to go on with daily lives without the on-site assistance of active duty family members, while at the same time worrying about the safety of those in a war zone. Wounded service personnel and veterans heroically work with pain and slow progress to become once again fully contributing members of society to the fullest extent possible.
There are plenty of sites in DC where it may be made clear to children that throughout our history, and yes, even today, heros in our country coming from every neighborhood all across the land have secured our freedoms. They have secured those freedoms that are practiced and debated at a national level in many of the buildings and sites we may see in DC, those freedoms that have been a foundation for much of the progress demonstrated in many of our museums in DC, those freedoms of expression seen in libraries and art museums and galleries.
There are plenty of heros. We just don't educate children to know what heros are.
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