NONFICTION - Jan. 21, 1996

SHOULD WE BURN BABAR?: Essays on Children’s Literature and the Power of Stories by Herbert Kohl (The New Press: $18.95; 178 pp.). No, we shouldn’t. Herb Kohl does a lot of soul-searching in this collection of essays, trying to come up with an optimal children’s literature, but the reader finishes this volume thinking Kohl has made a mountain out of a molehill. True, much children’s literature, from “Babar the Elephant” and the Uncle Remus tales to “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” carries implicit or explicit biases, but is it so hard to address such flaws in a teaching context? And should the first question asked about Jean de Brunhoff’s classic really be, as Kohl suggests, “Who has the power in ‘Babar’?” Kohl is right to be concerned, and the issues he addresses are important, but his agonizing ultimately seems self-indulgent. Not to mention counterproductive; readers who don’t share his views will find in this book much ammunition with which to ridicule progressive educational thinking.