How To: Manipulate Children

My teacher read The Story of Babar, by Jean de Brunhoff, to us in Modern World History last year. This was a little unexpected, considering the other books we had read were a little more in-depth than this 1930s children's story. Brunhoff writes about Babar, the little elephant, who moves from the jungle to Paris, and becomes polished and sophisticated. Babar later returns to the jungle, gets married, and together the couple rules over all the other elephants as king and queen. A more detailed summary can be found here.

In the context of my history class, The Story of Babar's soul purpose was to plant ideas about how urbanization is good in the minds of children growing up in the 1930s. Looking back now, I'm realizing how, although the ideas are still present, there is more to this story than the destruction of small villages in the effort to create giant powerhouse nations. Still, the idea of secret messages is ever-present.

If secret messages are present in what is supposed to be innocent children's books, it makes sense to assume that they are also common in the media, pop culture, and just about anything else you might come across. The result of this realization is more of a constant paranoia that I'm being forced and manipulated into believing certain things, rather than a skeptical eye searching for credibility. Hopefully over time, I will be able to see through empty ads and implicit news articles, but for now I'm alright with being paranoid.