Viet Thanh Nguyen writes in the New York Times about a book he read as a teenager:
When I was 12 or 13 years old, I was not prepared for the racism, the brutality or the sexual assault in Larry Heinemann’s 1974 novel, “Close Quarters.” Mr. Heinemann, a combat veteran of the war in Vietnam, wrote about a nice, average American man who goes to war and becomes a remorseless killer. In the book’s climax, the protagonist and other nice, average American soldiers gang-rape a Vietnamese prostitute they call Claymore Face.
As a Vietnamese American teenager, it was horrifying for me to realize that this was how some Americans saw Vietnamese people — and therefore me. I returned the book to the library, hating both it and Mr. Heinemann.
Nguyen's main point here is that he didn't ask for the book to be removed from the library and doesn't believe any book should be removed from a library. But as an aside, he also writes this:
Years later, I wrote my own novel about the same war, “The Sympathizer.”
While working on it, I reread “Close Quarters.” That’s when I realized I’d misconstrued Mr. Heinemann’s intentions. He wasn’t endorsing what he depicted. He wanted to show that war brutalized soldiers, as well as the civilians caught in their path. The novel was a damning indictment of American warfare and the racist attitudes held by some nice, average Americans that led to slaughter and rape. Mr. Heinemann revealed America’s heart of darkness.
This is what much of the "book banning" battle misses: there will always be legitimate arguments over what kinds of books are appropriate for children. In this case, it wasn't just the racism and brutality that the teenage Nguyen was unprepared for. He was also too young to understand what the point of all that racism and brutality was. He misunderstood the book completely.
This is common among books written for adults. Can a 13-year-old really understand the antisemitic brutality and racism of Maus? How about the soft-focus treatment of slavery in Gone With the Wind? Do either of them belong in a school library? How about in a classroom, where a teacher can explain them (as in the case of Maus in McMinn County)? Can we continue to teach Huckleberry Finn, complete with the n-word on every page? Or do we have to teach a bowdlerized version? Or not teach it at all, even with the best explanation in the world?
Different communities are always going to have different answers to these questions. Sometimes they're driven by bad intentions, other times by the best of intentions. And every once in a while, they suddenly spark a national furor even though nothing especially new or different is happening.
Right now we're having one of those national furors over a tiny handful of incidents. But it will go away soon enough if we all just calm down and ignore it. Even Fox News can't keep this going forever if liberals don't take the bait to go nuts over it.
I really don't understand you, Kevin... One day Fox news is an all-powerful force of evil that's gonna destroy Western Civilization; the next, liberals can ignore it. Is this a reflection of what the Evil Dex and other medications are doing to your mental balance? Or does it depend on whether you give an airborne intercourse about a particular issue?
"Even Fox News can't keep this going forever if liberals don't take the bait to go nuts over it."
Murc's Law in action.
Seems like they can keep it going forever, because here are effectively infinite chances of books, schools, and libraries.
We largely ignored Oberlin banh mi over a decade ago, but still, Anticancellation Warriors like the writer of this post, Kevin Drum, & his illegitimate son, Conor Friedersdork, bring it up unfailingly when considering all the ways the Libz have alienated the American.
Ignoring the complaints of the Orlando swasbucklers this weekend won't get them to stop mewling. In fact, if anything, doing so will mean five years from now Cpl. Archer will be platformed in the Atlantic.
I hate the N word.
Louie CK had a good riff on this.
When you say the N word, you are sticking the ACTUAL N word in my head.
You are too scared to say it or to write it but you want my poor brain to think about the actual word.
Are there any other words which, like Voldermort, can not even be spoken?
Huckleberry Finn was the first American novel written in the vernacular speech used by most people at that time. To pretend people spoke otherwise is to deny our history. I fear the switching to the bowdlerized version will just play into the hand of the "slavery wasn't all that bad" crowd.
Teaching Twain is essential, & most districts will work their way up to Huck Finn by grade 10 or 11. Start with the Calaveras Jumping Frog in grade 6 or 7, then on to Pudd'n'head Wilson in grade 8 & Tom Sawyer in grade 9 or 10, & you can have an audience wise to the vernacular, tone, & subject by the time Tom Sawyer is turned into a slavecatcher.
We are having these battles about books in schools largely because most adults (and teens) read very few books, and even fewer "literary" books. That has led many educators to try to push complicated, difficult books for adults down to younger and younger students. If they dont read "Beloved" in 11th grade, they never will!
My husband complained about reading Their Eyes Were Watching God as a high schooler, and when I read it in my late 30s it was obvious that, while I think it is a brilliant book, 99% of teenage boys will not understand it at all. It is a book that gains its richness from having a bit of adult experience and perspective.
I was the book club leader for a 5th grade book club that was for a middle grade novel about the Holocaust. But this was a group that didn't even know what Poland is, let alone any information about WWII. What were they actually getting out of a book about the Warsaw Ghetto? And that was a book written precisely for their age group! When my middle schooler read To Kill a Mockingbird I had to explain whole passages to him, because all sorts of attitudes and turns of phrase from the novel were completely foreign to him, and he is a shockingly well-read kid. If he was confused, you know most of the other kids were as well. If you understand very little of what is happening, then the brilliance of the literature is lost on you, and your lack of knowledge can cause you to miss important themes.
There is a wealth of fantastic literature for the young. And the books written for the young are more likely to be really understood by middle and high schoolers. Voracious readers will still find Beloved, Maus, Huck Finn, Slaughterhause Five, etc. (Those are all books I read on my own.) There is no shame in giving kids a strong foundation of quality young adult literature, especially since publishers are giving us more books written by excellent authors from diverse backgrounds.
I still remember the HS German class where for some reason we read an early German translation of the Roman historian Tacitus' writings. We got literally nothing out of it and poor Tacitus is probably still spinning in his grave over our translations. I would have learned a lot more German if they had just given me some German car magazines to read.
+1 copy of Bunte!
I sort of agree that there has been an attempt to get kids to read things that really only work for adults - not in my view the way to develop a love of reading. I remember in school reading things like "Mutiny on the Bounty", "Lord of the Flies", and "The Martian Chronicles." When my own kids were in school, they were assigned things like "One Hundred Years of Solitude" which, regardless of its literary merits, is not likely to say much to a teenager.
"This is common among books written for adults. Can a 13-year-old really understand the antisemitic brutality and racism of Maus? How about the soft-focus treatment of slavery in Gone With the Wind? Do either of them belong in a school library? How about in a classroom, where a teacher can explain them (as in the case of Maus in McMinn County)? Can we continue to teach Huckleberry Finn, complete with the n-word on every page? Or do we have to teach a bowdlerized version? Or not teach it at all, even with the best explanation in the world?"
Those seem like questions that should be answered by librarians and teachers, not County officials.
Exactly. This is why we have educators, especially history teachers, to contextualize content like this. For example, in my US history class, I include an analysis of Casablanca in the unit. Casablanca is very difficult for modern high school students to understand. The film language is alien to them, as are the social mores of the time. The story confuses them -- it has so much ambiguity. Without any explicit sex or violence, it's still very adult. It's also very complicated: a piece of Hollywood-produced war propaganda that accidentally became a part of the American cinematic canon; a story that features a Black main character who is called "Boy" throughout; the casual racism towards Arabs; ambiguous place of Vichy France and the role of collaborators vs the resistance; a love triangle in which both the men are, in their way, heroic in the end; the vast array of international characters and LOTS of irony, both dramatic and the usual kind.
Sometimes, of course, contextualizing material is nearly impossible. I showed the NYT "Day of Rage" report to my students as a visceral example of what is meant by "political unrest" in their textbooks. It didn't go over well with the Trumpsters, as you might imagine. I didn't hear from any parents, though, which I count a good thing.
I don't know. County officials are elected and answerable to the voters. I'm not saying this or that action is right or wrong but saying the elected school board should not have a say in what kinds of books are stocked in school libraries does not seem like a reasonable position to me.
I remember two things from high school English. 1) Most of my teachers bleeding all the joy and complexity out of every last book we read. (Only a high school English teacher can make Gulliver's Travels boring) and 2) Reading two of Updike's Rabbit novels for a project. At 17 I was already obsessed with my waning libido.
I'm with you on the "bleeding all the joy and complexity" out of books. I don't recall any books I had to read as being memorable enough to WANT to read them again. And I was one of those nerdy people who read all the time ... just not "Litrichure."
Fortunately, I was spared Updike. But "Catcher in the Rye" still annoys me.
In other news, I suspect that many Parents These Days have no clue as to how much profanity, sex, drug use, violence, and other things their precious little snowflakes have already been exposed to. They think they can bar the door after all the horses and the cows have long fled.
Updike is great. If you don't believe me, start here: http://www.tiger-town.com/whatnot/updike/
Agreed. And let me put a good word in for Cheever, too. Catcher in the Rye is annoying, though, it's true.
I put Cheever and Updike and a lot of other mid-century writers in the genre I like to call "priviledged white male on the verge of a nervous breakdown." You can put Catcher in the Rye in that genre as well. Frankly it describes a massive number of books written between 1940 and 1970.
I was about to say: OG trustifarian Wm. Burroughs, failed baseball player Jack Kerouac, & Louisville Latin School alum Hunter Thompson also fit in here.
It wasn't just ornery drunks from New England. Though of course Kerouac was an ornery drunk from New England. (So too Patricia Highsmith, the rarer woman exemplar of mid-century novelistic ennui.)
I'd put the Moviegoer in this category as well though I actually really like that book. But it for sure is a genre that a lot of well-regarded books fit in. Joseph Heller had one with Something Happened. Steinbeck had one with Winter of our Discontent.
The kind of people whose privilege and accomplishment would have made them significant people in societies of past eras but who today remain anonymous.
It's the axis of mid-Century New Yorker and academic fiction.
"I suspect that many Parents These Days have no clue as to how much profanity, sex, drug use, violence, and other things their precious little snowflakes have already been exposed to"
This would be amazing if true and I seriously doubt most parents are that naive. I'm a gen exer myself and growing up in the 70s and 80s I was exposed to a massive amount of profanity, drug use, violence, and sex and we didn't even have the internet back then. Any parents who "don't know" this must be willfully ignorant.
Uh you'd be surprised at how many willfully ignorant parents are out there. My mom certainly was in that camp in the 1970s/1980s and I see it now with some of the wingnut parents living in the conservative bubble.
Catcher in the Rye SHOULD be burned. After reading it, of course.
Terrible book.
Ugh. Pointless book.
In 9th grade English, we read the Lady or the Tiger & were assigned to write the ending (having just seen the infamous Seinfeld menage episode, mine included a threeway), & in 10th grade we read Leinegen v. the Ants & had to write our own man v. nature story after. I remember both those much more richly than any of the novels we read, & could get behind middle & high school curriculum going heavier on short stories & novellas. But I can't get behind policing content so much. The Monkey's Paw (8th grade reading class) slaps, & the Lottery (not in my school district's curriculum) is only so-so but still a worthy conceit. We need to challenge not coddle.
Also, the heaviest reading I remember was a play (A Raisin in the Sun) in 10th grade English, & even the two kids who spent a day in October '95 telling racist jokes about Popeyes catering the Million Man March weren't totally unreceptive to it. (Big ups, Dennis M. & Chris E. Get down with your pugnosed, nasal-voiced selves.)
That said, my 7th grade reading teacher still owes my class Snickers Ice Cream bars for finishing Snowbound before the end of the 2nd trimester. (We got to it with 2-3 was left in the term.) It's only been 29 years, Mrs. Salomon.
*wks, not was
Did you also read the companion story to the Lady or the Tiger, The Discourager of Hesitancy? It’s not quite as good, but still fun, and I love the title. Here’s Torah Wilcox reading with Robert Fripp doing background d music:
https://youtu.be/0vUXv5HtWRU
Thank heavens for Updike -- our English teachers would never have taught them or allowed them in the classroom -- I read my father's copies.
Gulliver's Travels is one of the funniest books ever written. No need to explain all the contemporary people and topics satirized in the book, especially Books I and II. These are shrewd and funny without footnotes.
Book III is tougher, where Swift satirizes contemporary "natural philosophers" (early scientists) who were mostly hobbyists, not all of whom were helping the human race advance. The chapter on the Struldbrugs OTOH is superb.
But many people have had problems with the Yahoos of Book IV, in describing whom Swift outraged some types of readers for hundreds of years. Thackeray was offended by the "filth" and "obscenity" in "Gulliver's" description of debased people in the Land of the Houyhnhnms. And then the book ends with a very odd twist.
The book that made the most impact on me in high school was All Quiet on the Western Front. That was my choice for a report. The class had to read The Crucible. I think both made a big impression on me. War is evil… and so are religious fanatics and hypocrites. Lesson learned.
These are hard questions. My second-grade teacher started to read "Wind in the Willows" to us, then abandoned it after a couple of chapters because she thought it was too hard for us. I suppose it was, but those couple of chapters brought me back to the book a few years later, and it remains one of my all-time favorite books. I read "Crime and Punishment" in high school and probably didn't understand half of what Dostoevsky was trying to say, but I kept coming back to him--now I understand perhaps 75 percent of what he was saying. I tried repeatedly to get my college freshmen to appreciate "Slaughterhouse-Five," but even though I thought I taught it better every year, they repeatedly said they found it confusing. One year I tried "One Hundred Years of Solitude," which almost nobody got, but for at least one student a light went on that I suspect has never gone out. Was it worth it for that one student? Guess I will never know.
And then there was "Moby-Dick," which was required reading in high school back in the day. It wasn't until my third reading, in graduate school, that I truly began to appreciate its greatness. Would I ever have gotten to that third reading if it had not been forced on me in high school?
Melville was the original travel blogger.
My daughter's interpretation when she read it was that Moby Dick was a gay romance. "It has "dick" in the title, Dad!"
Call me Jizz-male!
ha. i'm embarrassed to admit i laughed outloud.
I am doing guerrilla marketing for Jackass 4. In theatres February 4th.
How many of your classmates were turned off of reading forever by being forced to read Moby Dick though?
As I said, these are hard questions. My impression (offered here without evidence) is that most high school students at the time had to read Moby-Dick. My impression from years of teaching (in which I often asked the question) was that almost no high school kids now read Moby-Dick. Melville's reputation seems to have survived both eras. I suspect that Instagram had caused far more damage to students' reading habits than Melville ever did, In the classes I taught, I tried for a mix of books that might encourage more reading and that might challenge students to imagine what reading can be. Hard to know how well I succeeded. Sometimes I settled for Billy Budd.
It is now 2022, anyone who has yet to figure out that books no longer matter should pay more attention. People spend time on electronic media of all sorts, including reading literature of both the fiction and non fiction variety.
When I was 10, I started reading cowboy westerns by Louis L'Amour, by 15 I was reading Allen Drury, by 16 I had finished all of Allen Drury's books that were available to me.
Both of my parents were teachers, neither of them had even heard of Allen Drury. Most of you reading this right now will have to look him up if you care. Reading is something some people do and others just don't. Even well educated college graduates with masters degrees don't read books. Fighting over what book should be taught or not taught or what reading assignment should be given or not, is a waste of time and energy. If Fox wants to rail against something that makes no difference other than to rile up the 20 Million dunderheads that watch them, who the hell cares.
If you want your kid to be taught actual history and to read books, you better do it yourself, because the US education system has never taught actual history or for that matter how to read, history has been propagandized for as long as we have had public education and reading a book in class, if you can, is not going make a bit of difference one way or another.
“anyone who has yet to figure out that books no longer matter should pay more attention.”
LOL.
Printed books are arguably the greatest invention of mankind. They have yet to be surpassed. The fact that they do not require or involve batteries, passwords, operating systems, updates of any kind, electricity, hard drives, softwares, or compatibility issues: all of these are fantastic features that give printed books an unbeatable reliability and durability. They can be dropped, thrown, bent, slept on, or used as a stand, and they just keep working. A book can be put on a shelf and ignored for 100 years, then just picked up and immediately put to use again: that’s a phenomenal technology. There are no hard drives that can even come close to competing with that sort of longevity.
Printed Books, in short, will always matter as they will always be our most reliable mechanisms for the transmission of culture and other forms of knowledge. I doubt there will ever come a time where we don’t still need them.
"Right now we're having one of those national furors over a tiny handful of incidents. But it will go away soon enough if we all just calm down and ignore it. "
Look, Kevin, I believe you have the best of intentions but this just seems to be a wildly off-base and misguided analysis that ignores all the context of our current political, cultural and sociological situation. I won't even go into any details on what i mean, since I'm sure you're 100% aware this context and often write about it in ways that seem quite contradictory to this post. But I'd certainly be interested in your explanation of what I think maybe of your readers see as naivety and contradiction in your posts on these types of "culture war "topics.
Yeah, these are not one off school board meetings, but an organized campaign to make "protecting our kids" the predominant issue of the 2022 campaign. Conservatives don't want a debate on the economy or inequality so they are trying to change the conversation. Ignoring them won't make them go away.
exactly right. a decades long war that, as kevin has pointed out, liberals have to a large extent won in majority public opinion, but where conservatives are using the takeover of local political power to reverse the will of that majority. Or in the most prominent case of reproductive rights, through the takeover of the Supreme Court. But hey, if we just wait it out, shut the fuck up and stop scaring the poor, innocent republicans, everything will work out just fine. or something. really not sure what the heck kevin is arguing.
I think he is arguing that there are more important things to fight about, like the Supreme Court and voting rights and election subversion. So a kid in Texas doesn't read Maus in school, does it really matter that much? This is just the latest in a long string of contrived controversies to distract from the agenda of democracy subversion that could eventually elicit the collapse of our republican form of government.
How bout we care about things that will matter more than a month from now. So you actually do understand what Kevin is talking about, you just want him to be upset about something he sees as inconsequential.
I really don't understand because this is not some one-off event by a random local school board. As multiple people, including myself, have said, the context of this matters. Book removals, curriculum manipulation, racist hysteria about CRT etc etc etc is being pushed nationwide by the highest echelons of right wing power in a coordinated and successful PR campaign. Which is why it is not inconsequential.
How bout we care about things that will matter more than a month from now.
Let's ask the Governor of Virginia how much it matters.
The problem is that it isn't local school boards that are instigating this, there are now national conservative groups that are pushing this. Fox News is pushing this, that's why you're hearing about it.
And they are succeeding in getting their way, which is to get rid of almost everything that talks about racism or anyone that is LGBT.
The Texas Schoolbook Commission reaches its final form.
Oswald shot Kennedy from the Texas Schoolbook Depository building in Dallas.
This explains why JFK, Jr., is returning as a MAGA.
“to get rid of almost everything that talks about racism or anyone that is LGBT.”
I think the main problem I have with these discussions is that I don’t know what anyone is talking about. More precisely, I don’t know what their terms are referring to.
What on earth does it mean, for example, to get rid of everything that talks about racism or the LGBTs? Such terms and topics are potentially so broad, it’s kind of like saying that no one can talk about anything anymore.
This may be kind of an old example, but, wouldn’t this mean that all discussion of our Civil War is forbidden? Yes, I know, there’s a “lost cause” narrative. Nevertheless, the topic of slaves will eventually be unavoidable (see Emancipation Proclamation) and that kind of involves racism.
With the LGBTs, I assume eliminating all such discussion means no more Walt Whitman in schools? I mean, even in my own day we discussed some of Whitman’s explicitly homosexual poems in High School. Are you saying that current schools want to go back to a time before that was even possible? How far back would that be turning the clock? The 1950s? The 19th century?
And I see comments like yours everywhere. Just this morning, I saw an article about schools that want to ban the teaching of “diversity.” I like to think I’m fairly smart, but I have no idea what it means to ban the teaching of “diversity.”
I suspect there must be a lot of other people out there who hear these vague terms thrown around in this debate and have no idea what people are actually referring to. And I’m not sure such discussions really clarify anything.
Teaching Whitman's sodomite smut in your 1950s or 60s classroom is what led to our decadence today.
Had you not been brainwashed to abide Uncle Walt's funky buttlovin', M&Ms could still be sexy & Sarah Silverman could still rock blackface.
Florida has a bill working its way through the House that would ban talking about sexual orientation or gender identity in grade school.
Florida is also on its way to passing a bill that will make it illegal to teach anything that will make white students feel guilty.
These types of bills are proliferating through Republican states.
So, I have decided you are being willfully obtuse when you say you don't know what I'm talking about.
“illegal to teach anything that will make white students feel guilty.”
There’s no way that I know of for a law like that to stand up in court. People have to claim actual damages in court, and they’ll have to do better than “my feelings were hurt.” Even if that becomes possible in FL, it simply won’t hold up once such cases are appealed to higher courts.
Can such laws cause momentary drama? Probably. And maybe that’s all they’re really for: owning the Libs as a midTerm campaign issue. But, in practice, such laws will ultimately fall apart because of reasons similar to what I’ve mentioned above. Hurt feelings and “guilt” are just too broad and vague and subjective to base an actual (let alone successful) prosecution on.
If such lawsuits had a chance, the Woke crowd would have already charted this course. And, yes, this type of extremism really is a problem in the far left as well as the far right. But why do the Left wokesters resort almost entirely to bullying and name-calling (racist!) even after they claim that someone made them feel “unsafe”? It’s because such claims are un-prosecutable.
Once that kind of thing actually does become a prosecutable offense (in theory), that’s when we’re back in an actual inquisition. But we’re not there, and, even though our federalist system allows lots of crazy to flare up, I do not think it will ultimately allow an inquisition.
Is there?
Because Republicans seem to be standing quite fine. They just had the Supreme Court rule that since OSHA hadn't used its power before now to mandate vaccines that clearly it isn't needed now.
They also ruled doctors have no free speech to refuse being required to make false statements by the state. While also ruling that schools have no right to require students to not harass or swear at their classmates or teachers.
Republican courts wil rule whatever is convenient. There is not 'what will stand in court' anymore.
Personally I think a bigger problem with the novels we assign kids in middle and high school is that they all seem designed to permanently turn all kids off of reading for fun ever in their lives. YA novels assigned in high school are generally depressing and focus really hard on some "issue" or another. And then there are the "classics" like Moby Dick (discussed above), the Scarlet Letter, Les Miserables, Great Expectations and the like, mid-century classics like To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, or latter day classics like Beloved. Any and all of these may be excellent books but most of them are real slogs to read even for adults with graduate degrees in literature. I feel like the primary lesson kids learn from these books is that reading books is like doing your math homework. It's boring and not something you should spend your free time doing.
Also I have to mention this. In 10th grade we spent half the school year reading the existentialists. In 10th grade! The existentialists! Just what you want a bunch of 15-year-olds learning. Nothing matters. Life is a joke. Suicide is a reasonable option. WTF?
What other books would you suggest? Speaking for myself: I remember reading books like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the Great Gatsby, the Lord of the Flies (of course), and the Deerslayer. That was in HS, and I enjoyed all of those books (except, yes, the Deerslayer is a bit of a slog). My own main issue with books in HS, as I recall, was that we didn’t read enough of them. But I do realize that my sentiments were not widely shared …
Kevin's post and most comments are largely irrelevant to the actual "book banning" controversy because it is not about what specific ages can understand, how students can be introduced to literature and history, etc., but about teaching about racism. It was Youngkin's relentless campaign on banning CRT - which is not actually taught - that set off the parents and got them attacking schools. Open racism is no longer acceptable in most places, so they are not going to admit that they are acting to protect their own racism - the discussion gets diverted into age suitability and presence of shocking incidents, bad language, etc.
This is not something that should be ignored, nor should the media, pundits and bloggers go along with the diversionary tactic that pretends it is about teaching things that are "shocking" or "too advanced".
“It was Youngkin's relentless campaign on banning CRT - which is not actually taught - that set off the parents and got them attacking schools.”
If parents are convinced that there’s an evil menace called CRT, and that schools are indoctrinating their kids with it, and if those concerns harm DEMs in elections, and if those parents feel that schools are ignoring their concerns, and if DEMs respond that anyone showing any concern is racist: all this is bad for DEMs in election years.
DEMs need to acknowledge the concern of parents (which is quite often irrational). We also need to assert, even if it bother people on the far left, that concern about ideological indoctrination in schools is legitimate and that all parents have a right to inquire about it.
In regards to the idea that no CRT is taught in schools: that’s just not a good response. Schools have been assigning “between the world and me” for years. I have read over and over that the 1619 project is now incorporated into school curriculums. Parents know these things as well. They may also know that Ta-Nehisi Coates is the guy who stated - in writing - that he has no compassion or concern for the (white) first responders who sacrificed their lives to help others on 9/11. Parents have very likely heard also that the 1619 project has been heavily criticized as fundamentally inaccurate by historians across the ideological spectrum. And it is thus entirely understandable if parents respond with concern. Telling them that they’re just imagining everything is a great way to alienate voters and lose elections.
Yungkins ran as Tidewater Charlie Baker, & governs as Shenandoah de Santis.
The Democrat Party said this would happen & to vote Mc Auliffe, but the lamestream media said that was 4 Pinocchio hysterics & the #OurRevolution fifth column said that Mc Auliffe gave the electorate nothing to vote for. Well, Virginia, guess who was right in this scenario?
Yes. The CRT debate was never about CRT but about the teaching of racism. Book bans are not about protecting kids from profanity, sex, and violence but about denying them knowledge of the evils of racism, sexism, religious bigotry, and other societal scourges. That's why they go after Maus, Huck Finn, The Handmaid's Tale, and the works of Toni Morrison.
Of course, the Helen Lovejoys of the world can't come out and say that, so they cite absurd reasons like the cartoon drawing of a naked mouse as something 12-year-olds are too immature to handle. In a book about the Holocaust, for chrissakes. We're supposed to nod up and down as if these people are making complaints in good faith and not because they are trying to push some larger political and cultural agenda.
KD gives them the benefit of the doubt but the rest of us should not be duped.
8th grade -- Richard Henry Dana: Two Years Before the Mast. Now that was a horrible experience. Luckily it didn't turn me off of reading. It did teach me to skim quickly over the boring parts (like the entire book). A technique I still use with the countless dull/badly written/middle-brow books my book club often settles on.
Ok, weird example: Lord Foul’s Bane. It’s a fantasy book (the first in a ten part series) that features a rape scene. The rape is committed by the protagonist (Thomas covenant) of all ten books. As I recall, the rape is committed in the fantasy world, and the protagonist (a native of earth) may simply believe he’s imagining everything and that none of it matters because none of it is real (he’s called the unbeliever). In later chapters and books, he does seem to accept more of the reality of that other world, and he does show remorse once it hits him that he may have actually hurt “real” people. And I remember reading all this when I was maybe … 11? Or 12?
That was before “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces,” and I recall … having no problem with it. But these days I see discussion of that book series online dismissing it out of hand due to the rape (one scene out of thousands in ten books).
And I think this is one reason why school book questions and debates have never resonated with me much. I’ve just never really seen the big deal. Suppose kids do read something inappropriate for their age (as I arguably did in my example above). It’ll harm them … how exactly?
The Republican party is just a party of Trolls...
But that does not mean it's all sound and fury signifying nothing. Trolls can do and have done damage.
Leprechaun in the Hood is proof of this.
"Different communities are always going to have different answers to these questions. Sometimes they're driven by bad intentions, other times by the best of intentions."
Is "Good people on both sides" rehabilitated now?
We read Steinbeck (Of Mice and Men, and The Pearl), Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles) The Lord of the Flies, Centenial (lord knows why), and The Pigman. Those are the one we read generally, for Science Fiction class we read Frankenstein, Childhood's End, and I read Something Wicked This Way Comes, Dune, and Stringer in a Strange Land for extra credit.
I got something out of all of them, can't say I liked Lord of the Flies much, and a lot of my fellow teens could be pretty thick or lazy, or both) and required a smart and creative teacher to help them along. Given the proper context, kids and be pretty smart.
I turned my dyslexic son into a reader by bringing home a copy of Bored of the Rings One of my work study students had left it behind.
My mom used to read to us the books she was reading. I was a library rat. Had a wonderful Carnegie. Used to read a lot of 50's science fiction. There was mag I would pickup at the local mag and newspaper spot named Blue Book. I remember some poetry from high school and The Monkey's Paw. I remember my favorite parts of the Bible. The Song of Solomon and Ecclesiastes. https://www.biblica.com/bible/niv/ecclesiastes/1/ol/. Mom got a bunch of books from a friend and I read the Mysterious Stranger and Capt. Stormfields Visit to Heaven. She, King Solomon's Mines and Allan Quartermain. In the mess was all of the Tom Swift. In old age I now ride my Tom Swift electric bike.
Have to disagree, Kevin. Public comment at my district's school board meetings now is taking over an hour, all of it crazy anti-mask, anti-vax, anti-CRT, and anything else Fox tells them to get worked up over. They are a minority but they are making it very hard to get anything done. They're already recruiting their own pro-Fox candidates and start recall petitions. This is happening all across the state, and from what I gather, all across the country. This is the new front in the conservative war. Meanwhile, 9 states have passed anti-CRT education bills and it just keeps spreading. There are new bans every week.
Will they be able to keep it up? I don't know. But this is a widespread movement, not just a few schools having healthy debates over appropriate curriculum choices.
As a kid I read everything I could get my hands on…( they banned books in my Castro valley suburban community )…it just made me more curious. I read the classics..Dostoyevsky..Faulkner…we had a Great Books of the Western world…I read Plato and Malthus Theory of Population…plus..little women..black beauty, Heidi and Bird Girl Sacajawea….even when it went over my head I read it anyway….as a result I had a baseline of incomplete understanding ….when I read these books later in life I of course understood so much more…I was never afraid to tackle a difficult book. It’s been a great advantage in my life…learned it as a young reader…banning books is the worlds worst idea.
"Even Fox News can't keep this going forever if liberals don't take the bait to go nuts over it."
Seriously? Fox News is the only example ever of a machine that violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Look how long they've been sustaining the War on Christmas. It was years old when Bill O'Reilly was still a thing.