ABSTRACT
The making of books for children to learn from is founded on a series of assumptions that are rarely tested or even scrutinized: that when readers read 'non-fiction' they remember what they are told as 'facts'; that adult writers and illustrators not only know what children are bound to learn but also how they are to do it; that subject matter for primary school readers needs more pictures than texts so that the books can be made more attractive; that non-fiction is important, serious and instructive, while narrative fiction is purely recreative. That is, information books are to meet the demands of the curriculum and to supplement the knowledge teachers lack. 'Book learning' has an ancient solid ring about it. The history of literacy assumes this purposiveness (Clanchy, 1993). Nowadays, after their initial tussles with written language in print, children's next step, commonly acknowledged as progress, is to acquire and understand knowledge about the world written and stored in books. Books exist and are organized for them to do that.
