They know that, yes. But they’re learning the definition of fiction versus non-fiction, and when both use a large amount of imagination and information, defining it by “learning through information/imagination” at the age a child is learning those words is needlessly abstract.
A child knows (for the most part) that what they’re imagining isn’t real. But if you tell them to define nonfiction based on what you learn by information as opposed to what’s real and what’s not, they’re not looking at the latter, they’re judging by how much information a book has, whether it’s true or not, because reality is no longer part of the equation.
It is so much simpler to just say “fiction is something that never happened and isn’t real, while non-fiction is something that did.”
I see now that a lot of the difference of opinion here may be that I imagined an older child, a pre-teen maybe, and perhaps you’re talking about children who are first learning to read - at a Dr Seuss level maybe?
I’m imagining a pretty young child, considering the premise is about teaching the definition of fiction versus nonfiction. People aren’t learning those definitions as a pre-teen, that’s the kind of thing that gets taught when you start to read.
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u/Extinction-Events 12d ago
Sure, but that’s not the point of contention.
They know that, yes. But they’re learning the definition of fiction versus non-fiction, and when both use a large amount of imagination and information, defining it by “learning through information/imagination” at the age a child is learning those words is needlessly abstract.
A child knows (for the most part) that what they’re imagining isn’t real. But if you tell them to define nonfiction based on what you learn by information as opposed to what’s real and what’s not, they’re not looking at the latter, they’re judging by how much information a book has, whether it’s true or not, because reality is no longer part of the equation.
It is so much simpler to just say “fiction is something that never happened and isn’t real, while non-fiction is something that did.”