CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND THE INCREASING AGGRESSION AND VIOLENCE ON THE NIGERIAN CHILD: THE NEED FOR A PARADIGM SHIFT
Abstract
From time immemorial, Literature has been known to be averse to violence, aggression, war and insecurity in general. With the recent economic hardship in the contemporary time, the rate of violence and aggression rose to an increase and became extended even to children. Literature being a means, through which this aggression and violence are reflected, uses children’s literature in a very special way to depict these unfortunate realities as they occur in Nigerian homes, schools, societies cum communities and other agencies of socialization. This insecurity and unhealthy nature of the human society has made it necessary that the Nigerian child should be exposed to the social contradictions and inequalities inherent in the society and therefore forges a way of coping with it. The paper therefore employs children’s literature as a tool for not just exposing the various insecurities meted on the child, but also condemning and mitigating them to their barest minimum, using Nze, U. Nze’s The Patient House help as its literary corpora as well as its primary source of data. The Marxist literary theory is used as the frame work for the analysis of the collected data. The study finds out that the Nigerian child is faced with all manner of insecurity as evident in the body of the work. The study then suggests that the study of children’s literature as part of childhood curriculum will expose the Nigerian child to this menace, and will possibly enable him to avoid behaviors that may lead to such occurrence. The study will further sharpen the child’s insights as to what is obtainable in the environment in which he lives. The constituted authorities on child matters should rise up to their duties of enforcing unnecessary assault on the child.
Keywords: Children’s literature, Aggression, Violence, Nigerian child, insecurity, National development
Muotolu (Ekwosianya), Martha Chinonye
Department of Early Childhood Care and Education
Nwafor Orizu College of Education, Nsugbe,
Anambra State, Nigeria
E-Mail: ekwosianyam@gmail.com