You think parents should choose the books their children are required to read in school? Really?
How many parents do you think are qualified to do this? Obviously not the woman in then article…
I was an English teacher. Some of the parents I worked with would not want me to set any requirements at all. I was the one with the education in literature and the one who returned to school for professional development. I was the one who worked with my colleagues to develop appropriate academic standards.
As a Southerner, I knew that I had to tread carefully because of conservative community standards. I was always willing to offer alternatives.
This teacher also eventually offer the student an alternative assignment. That did not satisfy the parent. She wanted it banned altogether.
I’ve known of parents who wanted The Diary of Anne Frank banned because it teaches religious tolerance!
What if all 150 students have parents who want to select their books?
Thank you for posting this. Although, according to the article, there’s also another passage being objected to.
In my opinion, all of you who were pouring contempt on this woman without knowing the content of what she was objecting to were out of line. If the passages were, in fact, frankly pornographic, I think she’d have a right to complain about her high-schooler being required to read these passages. It’s appropriate for a line to be drawn somewhere before Farmyard Family Sado-Sex Orgy becomes assigned reading for second-graders.
Perhaps, somehow, we guessed - correctly - that the passages were not “frankly pornographic.” Pornography is, I’d like to remind Ms. Moron, intended to titillate, and I didn’t think a school would assign something that was actually porn. She’s too stupid to tell the difference between pornographic and sexual. The bit about the cousin propositioning the girl sure didn’t turn me on. That’s no more pornographic than The Bluest Eye, which I read as a high school senior, or Lolita, which I read as a college freshman and still count as one of my favorite books. So the word “pornographic” does not belong in this conversation. If someone wanted to argue the book was too graphic or explicit or something, that’d be different, although I think it’s equally wrong given the context.
I said this wrong. Unless something is really egregious, I do think parents should stay out of literature choices. Reading something graphic does not stunt or cripple a 17-year-old.
I think it’s about time that they banned Oedipus the King. It depicts incest! And the greeks were pederasts!
Leave it to you guys to passionately defend the right of a school to make a 17-year-old read a book about one cousin sucking another cousin’s dick. Christ, you people need to get some perspective.
Perspective on what? The fact that anything with sex in it is porn and people 17-year-olds need to be shielded from it? Tell us about the perspective we need, please, fucko. Don’t leave me dangling like that guy’s cock!
I presume that the majority of parents not only pay taxes to support their local schools but they are also permitted to vote for the school board. Though I don’t agree with banning a book I do think parents should have some input, shouldn’t they?
Marc
Sounds to me like they do have input. I’m not saying they should have none; I’m saying that people shouldn’t make the effort to enforce their sensitivities in this way.
The book is not about sucking dick. It’s 4 pages out of 289. Is Lord of the Ring about Tom Bombadill? Some of “us” need perspective…
Yeah. Next thing you know, we’ll be defending the right of a 17 year old to read about sullen kids killing their step fathers or adolescent girls going through puberty or what it’s like to be inside the head of one of those people you see talking to themselves all the time. We’re weird that way.
The whole idea behind getting kids to read some of these books is to expose (gasp!) them to different view points. Open their minds to things they’d never otherwise be exposed to. Getting them to think about things from a different perspective. My 12 year old read The Diary of Anne Frank in her history class last year. If 12 is old enough to know about something as obscene as “ethnic cleansing”, is 17 really too young to know about oral sex? Is it really that horrible?
Except from what I gather, most guidelines as to what students read what are done at state level.
In India, cousins are considered to be acceptable marriage partners in certain circumstances, although it gets a little complicated.
Can we ban The Scarlett Letter? Please?
In Russia acceptable marriage partners you!
Can we ban Kate Chopin’s The Awakening? I’m offended by the sucktacularness of it.
Tom Bombadil sucked dick?
Talk about the sap rising, eh?
Don’t you remember all the howls of outrage from the fanboys when they found out the Blowing of the Shire scene was cut from the movies?
note that it’s been two decades since I read any of the LOTR books and didn’t see the last two movies, so if Tom Bombadil isn’t in that Shire scene and this joke actually makes no sense, I apologize.