Nursery Crimes

Nursery Crimes, by Agnete Kvålheim
Ethnological Publishing Co-operative of Christiania, 301 pp, 299kr, November 2019

Nursery teachers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your shame. Agnete Kvålheim's new book is, in effect, a manifesto. Kvålheim draws on six months working part-time in the state education sector to reveal the poisonous ideological propaganda inherent in so many of the supposedly innocuous songs we teach to our smallest comrades. Enough, she declares, is enough: we cannot continue to inundate our precious next generation with such pernicious nonsense.

Kvålheim rightly points out, early in her debut, that songs and nursery rhymes which normalise the idea that animals (such as humans) eat other animals (such as cows) are fundamentally immoral. Such songs instill the children with a perverse sense of bioethics which is based entirely on the cow murderer's murderous ideology. We are depriving the children of knowledge of the true state of nature. Meat is murder, murder is unethical, and there is no ethical consumption under capitalism.

In a later chapter, she confronts the scarcely-concealed political subtexts of old favourites such as "Bjørnen sover". Consider, for example, the key lines:

Bjørnen sover,
bjørnen sover
i sitt lune hi.

"The bear is asleep, the bear is asleep, in its cosy den." Kvålheim rightly points out how unfathomable it is that such revisionism is presented as though it constituted a fully consistent historical damnation of the essence of Marxist-Leninist thought. Can it really be true that the Soviet republics were suffering neglect under a faltering government with Lenin at its helm? Most certainly not! Yet the unnamed writers of this nursery rhyme are trying to make it an incontrovertible fact that the the bear was "asleep" in its "cosy den", and then attempt to foist that "fact" upon the young and gullible. Was the victory over Nazi Germany in vain?

Finally, sensitive to the critique that her work may be heteronormative and/or characterised by Western privilege, Kvålheim is careful to address the shocking racism implicit in "popular" rhymes such as the following:

Vi er apekatter, apekatter, apekatter små,
Og vi liker oss best i trærne

Always a perceptive reader, Kvålheim is quick to decry the "smallness" of the "apes" in question, and the imperialist suggestion that their true place is "in the trees". Similarly, the separation between "apes" and "adults" later in the nursery rhyme reinforces abhorrent neocolonial attitudes towards supposed racial differences, and Kvålheim is absolutely right to suggest that our nursery workers must shake off the chains of imperialist oppression to protest against such monstrosities.

Let us reach a conclusion together. It is essential that we democratise our culture, deimperialise our history, decolonise our science, emasculate the patriarchy, and dehumanise zoology. It is our duty to prevent the upcoming generation from being brainwashed, by re-educating them as many times as necessary until they are able to think for themselves. Let us say again: nursery workers of the world, unite! These vile songs must never be heard between the brightly-coloured walls of a pre-school again.