As a part-time job, I tutor kids who are from low-performing schools. I provide some of my own materials and use some of the company’s materials. I bring a selection of books (that are mine) for them to choose from to read aloud during the session and to keep with them to read during the week. Today my 10th-grade tutee, age 16, chose Long Way Gone, an excellent book by a former child soldier in the civil war in Sierra Leone. It is gripping, well-written, and informative. My student really likes the book so far. I am a firm believer that any nearly any kind of reading (graphic novels, whatever), as long as age-appropriate, is good and worthwhile. So, if they are interested in something and want to read it, I say hallelujah. However, my husband questioned whether that book is too violent for a student his age. At the very least, I’m wondering if I should have cleared it with his guardian.
IMO, the book does not have gratuitous violence; it does include violence – it’s about a war. It tells about slicing people’s necks, about body parts being blown into the air. Perhaps the worst thing, to me, in the book is a sentence that says that the child soldiers were told that the rebels (against whom this child was fighting) made sons have sex with their mothers. (Which may well be true, I don’t know.) But he makes the point later that basically the same horrible things were told the child soldiers on each side about the other side (rebels vs. government army) to encourage them to hate and kill.
It seems to me that a kid his age is exposed to violence on TV and movies constantly, and in a way that glorifies it. On the other hand, reading a book about something true, that actually happened, and is still an issue, is worthwhile. The book does anything but glorify the violence.
If I’m ever a high school teacher, I’m teaching J.G. Ballard’s Crash. Kids need to understand just how beautiful a crushed instrument binnacle dripping with semen can be.
Terrible story, if true. And that’s the thing, I am seriously doubting the truth of the story. If you search the net, you will find that I am not the only one.
I just have have a hard time believing that a kid would have gone from a hip-hop loving pre-teen to someone who could slash the throat of a bound prisoner in the space of a year or so.
Maybe so, maybe not.
He may have been a child soldier. But if he was, it was more likely that he was a scared-shitless ammo-humping gofer than the cold-blooded killer he portrays himself to be.
I’m betting he was rounded up by some Western do-gooders, saw his chance for a meal ticket, and played it to the hilt.
My first thought is that there’s nothing too violent for a 10th grader. There’s certainly some range of emotional development, but mostly I think that’s past the point where they’re going to be traumatized by anything that doesn’t physically happen to them