As the editors declare in the preface, "In our choice of texts and in our introductions, we have paid close attention to...perceptions of race, class, and gender, among other topics, in shaping children's literature and childhood itself." Practically every text and every author (save for the "emergent") is subjected to a wicked scolding from the editors for its racism, sexism, and elitism. Forget about ogres, witches, monsters, and evil stepmoms; today's villains are gender stereotypes, white males, the middle class, and the traditional family. Retrograde literature must therefore be replaced by a new one, one that is, as it were, beyond good and evil: "In our postmodern age, in which absolute judgments of 'good' and 'evil' are no longer easily made, the distinction between heroes and villains is often blurred."
There have been three revolutions in modern children's literature.

The first was instigated by John Locke. In founding a new political and intellectual order—a liberal, tolerant regime—he believed that reforming children's education was of the utmost importance. Notably, he advised against reading Scripture to children, because, as he wrote in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, the Bible was ill-suited to a "Child's capacity" and "very inconvenient for Children." Locke's aim was to take education from the hands of the clerisy, and to overcome its domineering and persecutory spirit.

Contrast Locke's sensibility with that of a contemporaneous textbook. The God-fearing New England Primer (c. 1690), included by the Norton editors, drilled children in their ABCs thus:

A: In Adam's Fall

We sinned all

B: Heaven to find

The Bible Mind

C: Christ crucify'd

For sinners dy'd
This was an education not simply in reading and writing, but in living and dying, one that did not condescend to the limited understandings of children. Locke rejected all this, mischievously suggesting that children learn their letters by playing dice. In the wake of Locke's reformation, a more humanistic educational literature gradually blossomed. Unlike the somber New England Primer, the stories were secular, rational, and geared towards children. Though entertaining, these stories were meant to impart a moral message, to help children grow into responsible adults. In this sense at least, Locke still had something in common with the authors of the old New England Primer.
In the late 19th century, another revolution took place, this time marked by a wholesale shift away from moralizing. A new genre of children's fantasy emerged, seeking only to entertain. One of its most prominent voices was Lewis Carroll. As the editors explain, his "mockery of instructional verse, rote learning, and moralizing school curricula helped move the genre from eighteenth-century concerns with the instruction and correction of children toward modern celebrations of play." This era is known as the "golden age" of children's literature—golden precisely because it celebrated the innocence and playfulness of childhood, and sought to free children from the grief and worry of adults. Carroll's Crocodile, a parody, "seemed to license childhood playfulness, fantasy, laughter, and even idleness." "The change was welcome," add the editors.
Alas, golden ages never last, and children's literature was no exception. The third and last great change occurred in the 1970s, when writers started to "push the boundaries" of material considered acceptable for children. According to the Norton editors, "In the wake of this revolution, writers for the young can deal with sex, violence, disease, and death—in particular because many believe that the innocence of childhood has been destroyed by the media and the commodification of childhood."
Locke thought that the "tender" minds of children should be protected from the corruptions of the adult world—and yet these are now the genre's warp and woof. "Children's literature has also begun to resemble adult literature in subject matter," write the editors, "using frank and provocative language to depict and discuss social problems such as homelessness, drug addiction, abuse, and terrorism and expanding the notion of family to include nontraditional families led by single parents, stepparents, and gay and lesbian parents."
Thus the postmodern adult world, in all its vulgar glory, is visited upon our children. The editors enthusiastically endorse Jonathan Miller's 1984 picture book The Facts of Life, which includes a "pop-up penis." Apparently, alternative families provide especially good material for young readers today. After touting the groundbreaking work Heather Has Two Mommies, and chiding Focus on the Family and the Heritage Foundation for seeing it as a threat to "what they call traditional American values," the editors assure us that "there are today no real taboos in domestic fiction for young adults, and few in books for the youngest readers. Family stories now tackle every painful issue imaginable."
In a strange way, completely unappreciated by the anthology's editors, we have returned to the pre-Lockean age of children's literature. Locke wished to scrub stories clean of horrific images and premonitions of death—not because he was a naïf or a utopian, but because he believed it possible to build a more rational, humane world. The Norton editors break with him on this central issue. They do not believe in the possibility of a more rational world, or even, it would seem, in childhood itself. And so they have more in common with the New England Primer than they dare to admit. They, too, are obsessed with death and the apocalypse, only they don't believe in redemption.