alt Hacker NewsIt would (maybe?) sound like an inappropriate book for children. Yes, in the 2nd half of the 20th century. Not so in either 19th and 21st centuries.
In 19th century Italian (but maybe also other countries') children had to grow quickly to cope with life and work brutalities. They often had no mother, died while giving them birth, and started working at 7 or 8 to help their families.
In 20th century, instead, they have been constantly exposed to either real life violence and harshness (like war) or fiction brutality from movies, cartoons and video games.
Nope, Pinocchio is not that weird. It is when compared to an idyllic and peaceful world that has never existed but in our wishful thinking minds.
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I was born in the second half of the 20th century, I read Pinocchio as a child and the Grimm brothers and more. Those were the books for children. Did they damage us compared to kids of 50 years later? I can't tell. Probably nobody can tell until at least next century.
Spain until the late 60's (because the dictatorship put Spain cultural and economically behind the rest of Europe. My rural parents began to help parents in their village even at age 4 doing small tasks. No wonder the age on consent in Spain until a decade and a half ago was as low as 14... because it was a unchanged byproduct from the 70's/ society, where by age 14 the 99% of the population couldn't affort anything but basic education (which lasted into that age) and for sure by 14 you woud already be working in a trade as an apprentice as every other adult. And, OFC, you would have aches in your back because of farming with your parents (and women helped at home too).
So a 14 year old in the 1960 could one-hit KO a current 18yo kid from today in the spot because they had drastic hormonal and physical changes due to the hard work. OFC when they hit 30 they almost looked like 50 yo's from today.
I always laugh at some old soccer trading cards from the 80's where tons of players being at 19 look like men in their 40's. Yes, tons of them smoked like chimeneys and drank like pirates.
The book was never written for children, it was a satirist writing for adults under the guise of a children's book, just as it wrote under the guise of "travel guides". Even at the time, this work was considered weird and not in line with the morality of children's literature.
But even if you accept that children's lives back then were particularly brutal and this was in fact meant as a children's book: there is no evidence to suggest that exposing children to brutality in books will somehow help them function in a brutal world. If anything, I would think that such children especially need something "beautiful" in their lives: the fairy who comes with good advice, the dragon slain in the end, the lost child who finds their way home. A bit of hope.
But I'm not a pedagogue, just a dad.