Huh. I would have thought because they are worthless education-wise and shouldn’t be wasting space in a school.
Reading involves more than just heavy handed education. Entertainment also comes from reading. "Where's Waldo" is entertaining in short doses and you could argue that it builds observation skills.
TyrC!
That list is ridiculous. I guess I went to a fairly liberal school, as at least 10 of them were actually required reading.
In all honest, that “Scary Stories” series has some extreeemely freaky illustrations.
A big fuss was made at our school one year over the books. But the
main problem was that the librarian and/or teacher did not pay enough attention as to the books being checked-out with the age/grade of the child.
Parents were very irate when their second graders came home with a book that had curse words in it, or horror stories, etc.
I think if the book is age appropriate they should leave the books in the library.
A book is the only way to take a trip anywhere in the world when you have no other way of transportation…
My Brother Sam is Dead?! I read tha tin 6th grade for Eris’s sake. Madonna’s “Sex”, on the other hand… like that book would last two seconds in any library anywhere. Stolen!
I was in High School in California in the early 80’s and it was assigned reading in Freshman English. More liberal school district, I guess :).
- Tamerlane
There’s also the web! (More pictures, too.)
No doubt! My district was in Glendale, which was famous for conservatism at the time, at least. And famous for views far to the right of conservatism, at one time.
From stpauler’s link:
Re: Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank
Won’t somebody think of the children?
Robb’s list had at least a few, though, that I don’t mind being banned for kids under 18. The Anarchist’s Cookbook? In a school library? No way. Let the little buggers find it on their own, if they have to.
(FTR, I’m not really thinking about big damage on a Columbine scale, but rather smaller mischief the kids will get up to, but you don’t want to be encouraging them…)
Bridge to Terabithia should never be allowed near children. It broke my heart when I was 8, and I’ve never recovered.
I’m also not exactly surprised to see that “The New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein” was banned.
Wow. I went to school (9 years Catholic, 3 years public) in a very conservative area, and yet I was either required to read, or read to by the teacher, seven books off the list Robb linked to. And to the best of my knowledge, no one complained. Actually one of my English teachers - a nun, yet! - got a big kick out of another student’s parody of The Catcher in the Rye…
I find it interesting that Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret is all the way up at 62, but Then Again, Maybe I Won’t didn’t make the top 100. The latter seems quite a bit more explicit to me… or maybe it’s Margaret’s religious skepticism that puts “her” book over the top? And why ban Blubber? Uncomfortable with facing the fact that kids can be cruel and teachers pretty useless? (My fifth grade teacher read these three books aloud to us, and I loved them all.)
I remember getting in awful trouble at school for writing a synopsis on "Mein Kampf ". I had read nearly all the regular books in the school library, so tried something different
Lord of the flies should be banned… banned for being crap. It is one of the single worst books my school has ever assigned me to read. i hate the entire thing…politics aside it is just plain old crap…
and we all weep for the black heart of man…
oh please spare me
If I’m reading this right, we are looking at 6,400 challenges with an unsubstantiated assertion that “Research suggests that for each challenge reported there are as many as four or five which go unreported.”, which comes to appx. 40,000 challenges.
Now, what do they mean by challenged? According to this page, “A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group.” Note that they are NOT bannings, and even those challenges that are laughed at by the board can still be listed. I was unable to find any information as to how many challenges actually result in a banning, but since the ALA site is pulling numbers out of their ass, I will too - I will assume that every challenge reported resulted in a successful banning (which is very likely NOT the case). So that gives us 6,400 bannings.
Now we have 40,000 (unsubstantiated) challenges and 6,400 (unsubstantiated) bannings. Given America’s 17,000 school districts and over 104,000 schools (public and private), we are talking about one challenge for every 3 schools and one banning for every 16.25 schools. Over a TEN year span!.
So, unless we are talking about the worlds great religious texts, we are not exactly looking at a plague of censorship here people. :rolleyes:
In regards to Catcher, the second most common reason to challenge a book is improper language. So, Masonite, it very well wasn’t likely that they banned it for being subversive (which didn’t even make the list).
In short, let’s relax here, people. If somebody throws up a challenge, fight the good fight and keep the book in the school/library. But don’t use this list as an excuse to rail against the religionists* or whatever group you don’t like.
*I wonder if the list includes those religious books that are not supposed to appear on public school grounds, hmmmm? You know, The Bible, The Koran, etc.? That’s about 95,000 bannings right there, per title! Given this, I would definitely argue that the American Left has banned far more books in this country than the Right has ever dared hope to dream.
Oops. Forgot to put a link in. Here’s the corrected passage:
“According to this page, “A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group.””
I read Catcher in school in the 10th or 11th grade, I can’t remember which. But I was at Chamblee High School, which was then located in Newt Gingrich’s congressional district, in the state of Georgia. Hated it, btw. I also read Huckleberry Finn (hated it too), LotF ('twas OK), and Ethan Fromme (pretty good) for school as well.
IAN American. Is this correct? Religious texts, however great their social and cultural signficance, are banned from American school libararies? Tell me it ain’t so!
Not “banned” per se, but many schools don’t have them for fear of the ever-popular lawsuit. The ALA site does list the Bible and Koran as among the “challenged” books, but never mentions the basic fact that those books are simply not available at many public schools because of the fear of lawsuits brought about by the Left in the “Church vs. State” fight of the past 40 years. That was my point.
Here’s a link as to the commonality of such lawsuits. To give you an idea of what a teacher has to think about if they dare want to mention the Bible as a cultural force in the West, check out this page. Upon reading the previous link, can you imagine why many educators and administrators don’t even want to tackle the subject, much less make it available to come up?
No offense, but your link doesnt cite anything close to a lawsuit over simply mentioning the cultural importance of the Bible, and the second link seems perfectly reasonable: you can teach about it all you want: but you can’t lead someone else’s kids in devotional worship on public time.
I would be interested in hearing the opinions of the other members on whether or not it is appropriate to ban The Turner Diaries from school libraries.
Regards,
Shodan
ps - No, I haven’t read it. Have you?
I went to a Catholic school, and we did “The Lord of the Flies” in Grade 7. We did “On The Beach” in Grade 8. “Tom Sawyer” was on the list of eliligible book reports as early as Grade 4.