Is it cruel to crush your child’s dreams?

I think it’s for the best if we ban all children’s books containing the word ‘dream’. Dream big, little dreamer, dare to dream… that sort of thing. And especially an unbelievably popular series of books for primary school children, name of Little People, Big Dreams. There are hundreds of titles in this series and nearly four million copies sold worldwide. It’s a rare school that doesn’t stock them. Bin them all, I say.

Perhaps it sounds cruel to actively want to crush a child’s dreams, but it’s for their own good. The books sound cosy, aspirational, unobjectionable, but in fact, deep in children’s young and spongy minds, they’re sowing the poisonous seeds of false ideas that might later do them real harm.

Little People, Big Dreams is series of illustrated books for kids of five and over that tells the life stories of what it considers history’s admirable men and women: Darwin, Mary Shelley, Marie Curie, Malala, Elton John, RuPaul… The books imagine what these high-achieving adults were like as children: bright-eyed and bravely refusing to be cowed. The back of each book explains the conceit: ‘All of [these people] achieved incredible things, yet each began life as a child with a dream.’

This, then, is the first whopping lie told by the pedlars of dreams. It’s just plain untrue to say that the men and women of history started out by fantasising about some great achievement. Marie Curie didn’t spend her time hankering for a Nobel Prize, she just got on with studying the science. In no possible world was John Lennon ‘the boy from Liverpool who dreamed of peace’. Lennon as a child, in his own words, ‘did my best to disrupt every friend’s home’.

What unites great men and women isn’t a capacity to dream big but a love of what they do and a capacity for sheer graft.