How children’s books challenge us to hope harder

Reading an award-winning children’s book challenges Elizabeth Wainwright much more than expected - to imagine and hope.

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

A close up of face, showing an eye, mostly obscured by a closely-held open book.

This year, the Waterstones book of the year prize was awarded to Impossible Creatures, a fantasy book for children by Katherine Rundell. This was not the children’s book of the year; this was overall book of the year – it beat novels and non-fiction books for adults. I felt momentarily but deeply joyful when I heard the news and was curious why.

During the pandemic, I found myself unable to read the non-fiction books I usually turn too. Even adult fiction felt heavy. It was children’s books and authors I turned to. Philip Pullman, Dodie Smith, Alan Garner, Ursula K Le Guin. Others new to me. On reflection, I wasn’t reading these books because they were in any way easier, because they weren’t – they asked me to think and hope and imagine much harder than a lot of adult books, despite everything the news would have me believe. And it is for that very reason that I sought these books out. The Waterstones prize made me think a bit more about this – and why it might matter now especially.

Imagination helps us to confront and solve problems – it is not an indulgence, it is essential for the becoming world, and for being the people we are called to be.

First, I thought about my time as a District Councillor in local government. Here, I quickly learned all sorts of things about planning, environment, community, working across opposition and more. I needed to call on my perseverance, patience, strategic thinking. But the things that I found myself calling on again and again were imagination and relationship-building. Building relationships – especially with people who weren’t like me – was the only way to get things done. And imagination because it’s the thing that recreates, that sees things as they could be not as they are. Albert Einstein said, “we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”, and I’ve seen how that’s true. It did not feel enough, for example, to try to fix problems of dwindling budgets with more cuts and more inefficient meetings. Instead, imagination asked me to think about what this budget-setting process might look like at its best, and how the wider community might help us decide priorities, and how we might restructure our work so that the District doesn’t just scrape by, but thrives. It asked me to step out of business-as-usual, and imagine business-as-it-could-be.

Jesus too shows us the importance of imagination – he so often called out who he saw people to be, not who they were. And he points us now towards what is yet to come. He calls us to wait, and to trust in his arrival – however distant it might feel. Children’s books often do this too: Frodo trusting that the ring would be destroyed, imagining life outside of the grip of the darkness of Mordor, despite all evidence to the contrary. Bastian’s imagination helping to save Fantasia in the Neverending Story. Jo March showing the possibility of another kind of life in Little Women. Imagination helps us to confront and solve problems – it is not an indulgence, it is essential for the becoming world, and for being the people we are called to be.

I think the best children’s books do the same thing – they ask us to look up, to look out, to feel the whisper of the voice behind us urging us on to something more beautiful.

Second, the children’s books I read during lockdown gave me hope in a way that books for adults didn’t at the time. Hope is, I think, innately tied to imagination. It asks us to look ahead, even when things aren’t clear, and walk forward. Rebecca Solnit explores hope, optimism, and activism in her short book Hope In the Dark. She says,

“Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.”

I think the best children’s literature shows us how to hope, and shows us what right action can look like when we invoke that hope. In Rundell’s Impossible Creatures, Mal and Christopher must save the ‘Archipelago’ – where mythical creatures still live – and the world beyond them from a growing darkness. Hope shines bright, reminding the reader that it is not naïve but necessary and world-changing, if we let it be. Hope changes things. In the New Testament, Paul tells that along with faith and love, hope will remain. When it feels like the world – fictional, or real – is falling away, hope will remain. Coupled with imagination, bound with faith and love, made active with hands and hearts, it might just pull us through to things we cannot yet see.

When she won the National Book Award, Ursula K Le Guin underlined the necessity of imagination and hope right now:

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.”

Jesus was the ultimate realist of a larger reality. He asks us to love in the face of hate, to believe that food and wine can come from faith, to believe so hard in love – not as a pink heart-shaped commodity, but as a world-shaking force – that we might literally see resurrection. Jesus lived in a particular place, at a particular time, grounded in people and soil and society, but always pointing to the bigger truth he knew, and to a world that did not yet exist. I think the best children’s books do the same thing – they ask us to look up, to look out, to feel the whisper of the voice behind us urging us on to something more beautiful. Importantly, this is not a rejection of the world as it is – we are called to love our neighbours here and now, to build the kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. But in what is, there is the seed of what could be, there is a light that shines in places that are still dark. I think the gospel, and the best children’s books, help us to see that light and see what it might illuminate. Jesus knew that children’s minds were perhaps better at seeing this light – he even says, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” Allowing ourselves to imagine, to hope, is perhaps the only way we’ll take the kingdom of heaven seriously here on earth.

Katherine Rundell herself has pointed out that children’s books don’t just make good readers, they make good people. I think that with imagination, hope, courage, and more, they help call forth the people we are becoming, and the world that could become. That is why I turned to them during lockdowns, that is why I turn to them now as parts of our world seem dark, and that is why I turn again and again to Jesus – the ultimate realist of a larger reality.

Article

AI - Artificial Intelligence

Community

Culture

Education

27 October 2025

5 min read

Artificial Intelligence needs these school lessons to avoid a Frankenstein fail

To learn and to learn to care are inseparable

Joel Pierce

Joel Pierce is the administrator of Christ's College, University of Aberdeen. He has recently published his first book.

A cyborg like figure opens the door to a classroom.

AI in the classroom.

Nick Jones/Midjourney.ai.

Recent worries expressed by Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, over the welfare of his chatbot bounced around my brain as I dropped my girls off for their first days at a new primary school last month. Maybe I felt an unconscious parallel. Maybe setting my daughters adrift in the swirling energy of a schoolyard containing ten times as many pupils as their previous one gave me a twinge of sympathy for a mogul launching his billion-dollar creation into the id-infused wilds of the internet. But perhaps it was more the feeling of disjuncture, the intuition that whatever information this bot would glean from trawling the web,it was fundamentally different from what my daughters would receive from that school, an education.

We often struggle to remember what it is to be educated, mistaking what can be assessed in a written or oral exam for knowledge. However, as Hannah Arendt observed over a half century ago, education is not primarily about accumulating a grab bag of information and skills, but rather about being nurtured into a love for the world, to have one’s desire to learn about, appreciate, and care for that world cultivated by people whom one respects and admires. As I was reminded, watching the hundreds of pupils and parents waiting for the morning bell, that sort of education only happens in places, be it at school or in the home, where children themselves feel loved and valued.

Our attachments are inextricably linked to learning. That’s why most of us can rattle off a list of our favourite teachers and describe moments when a subject took life as we suddenly saw it through their eyes. It’s why we can call to mind the gratitude we felt when a tutor coached us through a maths problem, lab project, or piano piece which we thought we would never master. Rather than being the pouring of facts into the empty bucket of our minds, our educations are each a unique story of connection, care, failure, and growth.

I cannot add 8+5 without recalling my first-grade teacher, the impossibly ancient Mrs Coleman, gazing benevolently over her half-moon glasses, correcting me that it was 13, not 12. When I stride across the stage of my village pantomime this December, I know memories of a pint-sized me hamming it up in my third-grade teacher’s self-penned play will flit in and out of mind. I cannot write an essay without the voice of Professor Coburn, my exacting university metaphysics instructor, asking me if I am really saying what is truthful, or am resorting to fuzzy language to paper over my lack of understanding. I have been shaped by my teachers. I find myself repaying the debts accrued to them in the way I care for students now. To learn and to learn to care are inseparable.

But what if they weren’t? AI seems to open the vista where intelligences can simply appear, trained not by humans, but by recursive algorithms, churning through billions of calculations on rows of servers located in isolated data centres. Yes, those calculations are mostly still done on human produced data, though the insatiable need for more has eaten through most everything freely available on the web and in whatever pirated databases of books and media these companies have been able to locate, but learning from human products is not the same as learning from human beings. The situation seems wholly original, wholly unimaginable.

Except it was imagined in a book written over two hundred years ago which, as Guillermo del Toro’s recent attempt to capture that vision reminds us, remains incredibly relevant today. Filmmakers, and from trailers I suspect Del Toro is no different here, tend to treat the story of Frankenstein as one of glamorous transgression: Dr Frankenstein as Faust, heroically testing the limits of human knowledge and human decency. But Mary Shelley’s protagonist is an altogether more pathetic character, one who creates in an extended bout of obsessive experimentation and then spends the rest of the book running from any obligation to care for the creature he has made.

It is the creature who is the true hero of the novel and he is a tragic one precisely because his intelligence, skills, and abilities are acquired outside the realm of human connection. When happenstance allows him to furtively observe lessons given within a loving, but impoverished family, he imagines himself into that circle of growing love and knowledge. It is when he is disabused of this notion, when the family discovers him and is disgusted, when he learns that he is doomed to know, but not be known, that he turns into a monster bent on revenge. As the Milton-quoting monster reminds Frankenstein, even Adam, though born fully grown, was nurtured by his maker. Since even this was denied creature, what choice does he have but to take the role of Satan and tear down the world that birthed him?

Are our modern maestros of AI Dr Frankensteins? Not yet. For all the talk of sentient-like responses by LLMs, avoiding talking about distressing topics for example, the best explanation of such behaviour is that they simply are mimicking their training sets which are full of humans expressing discomfort about those same topics. However, if these companies are really as serious about developing a fully sentient AGI, about achieving the so-called singularity, as much of the buzz around them suggests, then the chief difference between them and Frankenstein is one of ability rather than ambition. If eventually they are able to realise their goals and intelligences emerge, full of information, but unnurtured and unloved, how will they behave? Is there any reason to think that they will be more Adam than Satan when we are their creators?

At the end of Shelley’s novel, an unreconstructed Frankenstein tells his tale to a polar explorer in a ship just coming free from the pack ice. The explorer is facing the choice of plunging onward in the pursuit of knowledge, glory, and, possibly, death, or heeding the call of human connections, his sister’s love, his crew’s desire to see their families. Frankenstein urges him on, appeals to all his ambitions, hoping to drown out the call of home. He fails. The ship turns homeward. Knowledge shorn of attachment, ambition that ignores obligation, these, Shelley tells us, are not worth pursuing. Will we listen to her warning?

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