It seems they’ll have to remove the “Liberty” from the name of “Olentangy Liberty High School” as a superintendent of schools overrules a teacher and a principal there and forces the removal of a book from an English class’ recommended list. Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” was deleted from the high school teacher’s recommended list, over the objections of the teacher and the school’s principal. What horrible feature of this book prevented it from even being on the recommended (not required, just recommended) list for the 10th grade?
The complaint of parent Barbara Reierson, who demanded that the reading option be removed for ALL 10th graders, even though her son would never have had to read the book:
There are 14 pages with derogatory references to Jesus… and 16 pages of [profanities related to] God. But I only found one d-a-m-n and thought, ‘Well, I got off easy there.’
It’s good to know that if you spell the word “damn” rather than say it, The Lord doesn’t get upset. But it’s a shame to see the public schools used to keep all attending students from even having the option of reading a book — because it is UnChristian.
I suggest that if Ms. Reierson wants her child to refrain from reading an UnChristian book, she exercise her parental authority and require him to select an alternative book from the list. If she cannot manage somehow to exercise her parental authority, I suggest she enroll her son in a private Christian school, where she can be guaranteed that no offending ideas will even bounce off her precious boy. If she cannot manage either of these tasks, then she needs to begin to look closer to home for problems to remedy.
We live in the United States of America. We have a Constitution. And under that Constitution, it is not appropriate for pushy parents to demand that no child even have the option of being exposed to an idea, on the grounds that it is religiously offensive to some Church, Sect, or Cult. In this country, especially under the guiding discretion of a teacher, ideas are supposed to remain fee.
“Supposed to” are the key words here. In the empirical world beyond our supposition of liberty, American theocracy is showing its strength.
C’mon now Jim, you’re only telling part of the story. The first thing the offended Reierson did was to use the Amazon search engine to do a search for the ‘F-word’ with the book’s title. She supposedly came up with 12 pages and another 13 pages if ‘-ing’ was added to the word. She then did two more searches with the words ‘Jesus’ and ‘God’.
First of all, she lied. I tried to do a similar search on Amazon and could not reproduce her result. How could I? Amazon does not carry the full text of books, but only excerpts. I did find all four words in excerpts, though, so the book does contain some of this language.
Second of all, I was upset becasue the book is narrated by a teenage boy with autism–I have a teenage family member with autism (who definately does not use this type of language). Does the book perpetuate a stereoype of people with disablilities?
Looking at the Amazon searches, it was clear the profanity was actually used by the boy’s parents whose marriage is breaking up and possibly by other adults–the excerpts are pretty short and you can’t tell who is talking in all of them–but the boy is just repeating language used by adults who are angry with him. A review by an autistic reader was enthusiastic.
So what about it? I have lately noticed the f-word also creeping into mainstream novels and whodunits. Is this appropriate for teenagers? And doesn’t the word refer to copulation? If you say something is ‘shitty’, you are comparing it to something that smells bad and is disposed of in a sewer. If you compare something to copulation, doesn’t this say something troubling about our attitude towards sexuality? Just asking.
When I was a junior in high school twenty years ago, I did a book report on “Why I Am Not A Christian” by Bertrand Russell. It was in my public high school’s library. My son was a junior in the exact same high school I attended last year, and guess what? That book is nowhere to be found in the high school library. Neither are many of the books I read back in the 80′s. Just because these Christian fundies are not in front of the library burning them, doesn’t mean they’re not censoring what our teenagers are reading. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s just plain wrong. If I wanted a limited reading list for my son that was censored for content, I’d pay the money to send him to a private school. These busy bodies need to quit picking and choosing what other people’s children get to read, based on their narrow view of the world.
When my sons were in school they had an english teacher who called after the ordered “enrichment” books came in, to check if it was all right for the kids to have them. She was always quite surprised at what people found objectionable.
In my army days I found out that it was worth one’s time to always carry something to read as ‘hurry up and wait’ were the law of the land, and I’m never without a book to this day. A group I used to perform with was on the road, and the wife of one of the members expressed boredom. She wondered if she could read what I was reading while we were performing, and I said yes, handed her Parke Godwin’s “Waiting For The Galactic Bus”. After we were done I asked for it back, and she was very angry with me. It was blasphemous and terrible, and she was offended that I had loaned it to her. (I hadn’t known she was that much of a fundy, figured she was a fun, lively person.) She had torn it into little tny pieces, and thrown them out. I asked her why she had done so to property which wasn’t hers, she said that NO ONE should be allowed to read such things, even me; she didn’t care WHOSE property it was. I also had a back-up book, Koman’s “Jehovah Contract” in German. I hate to think what she would have done if she’d have been able to read THAT one.
Our local library finds that books and magazines of a secular/humanist/atheist flavor either disappear or are defaced almost as fast as they get them in.
First they ban the books from the Schools. Then they call them “filled with impure thoughts…” Then they have rallys, where they burn the books. Then they arrest the writers of the books (if possible). Then they round up the readers of the books.
Does anyone out there see where I’m going with this? Does anyone believe it? Does anyone care? Hell, if they’re going to ban a book, let them ban “Silas Marner”. I’ve never read such a tedious piece of shit in my life. (It was required reading in my Junior year in High School.) OOPS! I used naughty words in this…Oh, SHIT! Here come the Brain Police!!!
Seriously, this kind of crap has been happening for years. The Fundies go through cycles, it seems, where they feel compelled to point to some perceived “moral degradation in literature” and stir a fuss. Again, in high school, we were assigned Steinbeck’s “The Grapes Of Wrath”, a book that, to this day, i proudly keep a copy of in my library. It presents an accurate depiction of life in my home state circa 1936. I know, as a friend’s father read it (stayed sober for two whole days; quite an accomplishment for him!), then told my friend,”Read this book, boy. This is about us!” To this day, the Fundies castigate this book for its moral flavor. Personally, I love Steinbeck’s definition of a Bolshevik in it…By the way, Sarge? I think it would’ve been fun to take the woman to Small-Claims Court, and have the judge order her to buy you a new copy. But I’m just ornery. And I’m also a compulsive reader.
But that book is supposed to be a very good look into the life of someone leading a very different life from normal people…
Censoring words is bad enough, censoring IDEAS? Creepy.
And Sarge; I’d be pretty hurt if someone destroyed my property over their personal views… It’s rather sad that various people would agree with her actions. Any idea what in particular upset her?
Mike, I thought about that course of action, but time is at a premium to me (I have a couple of medical conditions which will terminate my tenure here relatively painlessly, quite unexpectedly, suddenly, and messily) so I try to stick to the postive.
I am dyslexic and value reading and books quite a bit, and now since I only have one eye to do it with I treasure it all the more. Loved Grapes of Wrath. I served with a fellow who was retired, but a gov’t employee, and he had gone into the army at 16, and it was the saving of him as he was able to get in during the time and in the place of that book. He wanted to get a pass three nights a week so he could get schooling, and was severely punished for it. His commander called him a “Bolshevik”, but everyone who wanted to put themselves on a parr with those who were thought to be “quality” were always considered such, and thus dangerous.
Yeah, the school required reading list. Christ on a crutch! The Canerbury Tales…we got the knight’s Tale and the Nin’s Priest’s Tale, and it’s still numbing to think about. ‘course then I read the Scholar’s Tale and another one that had farting, nudity, and sporting about. Neat! Also, when we got back from Ethiopia, to get into the school I was assigned to, a test was required and I had to read the Diary of Samuel Pepys. Well, it was heavy going, I can tell you, and I complained like a camel under heavy burden. My father, in an effort to promote charactor, took me to the library where there was a complete, unabridged, and unexpurgated set of volumes of his diary. Turns out that our boy Sam was a real piece of work, even molested women in churches, got pretty graphic in his discriptions of his adventures. Just the thing to help a boy just entering his teen years along the way! I even disdained PLAYBOY as not holding a glimmer to Sam’s foolings about! But…I had checked these tomes out quite often, and my father was suspicious, and picked one up. Naturally, it fell open to one of my favored places. Dad was not amused, in fact quite alarmed. Next time I went to check it out I was told I was barred from doing so at my father’s request.
Funny, now about all I can remember specifically was that when he went to work for the royal ship yard, he had to hire a merchant to teach him arithmetic and book keeping so he could keep the contractors from screwing the gov’t. This from a man who had the best a university could offer. And no, he wasn’t thanked for his efforts.