In the program of kokugo teaching for primary schools, juvenile literature is included as a required item. No doubt stories for children are very useful for teaching material, but it is also true that they have something that can't be contained into the present educational system. Thus the relation between juvenile literature and kokugo teaching is worth while reviewing. Here I will consider it in terms of the following topics; the meaning of reading just for fun, the system of classifying literary texts into the genres such as "realism," "fantasy," "nonsense," and so on, the primacy of realism over other genres in criticism on children's books, people's habits of reading, images and representations of children.
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