I'll Stand on the Soapbox with Ms. Park

I completely agree with Ms. Park about the things that she said in her article. Books are important for so many different reasons and they need to be handled for the important things that they are. I remember, when I was still a small child getting ready to enter adolescence, that there were books that I felt were insulting my intelligence at times. People forget that children are more intelligent than they are initially given credit for and this leads to the publication of materials that are, at times, sub par. I think that it is important for the adults that work at these publishing companies to think back to when they were children, and ask themselves what they would have thought if they had been given one of these jokes of a book by their parents. No one wants to read something they feel is demeaning to them the whole time; this same idea applies to children and adults forget that.

I think that Park did a good idea of expressing this particular idea in A Single Shard. It wasn't one of the main themes of the entire novel, but it was still present. Min was always taking longer than the other potters to produce his work. The others would work with care but they would also work very fast. Min just took his time and paid attention to the detail of his work to make sure that he produced the absolute best work that he could to sell to people. He wouldn't even show a broken shard of his work to prove that he really could reproduce the new technique. He had a very all-or-nothing mentality. This is exactly what Park was getting at in her critical article: the companies that are publishing these children's books need to be sure of what they publish, and make sure that they give the kids suitable works to read because the future depends on future generations of children.