A student in the county north of us is refusing to read a book that is required for one of her high school courses. The book is The Wind Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. She claims that the sexual imagery in the book is too graphic. She is a top ten student in her IB class. She feels she should not be penalized for choosing not to read this book and her parents support her decision. The teacher/school have declined her request for an alternative assignment.
What say you, Dopers? Should she be “forced” to read this - she has opted not too and will take the potential hit on her grades. I don’t know much about this book, but assuming that it is actually sexually graphic, should the high school include sexually graphic materials as part of the core curriculum? Or is there a better compromise solution.
I don’t currently have a strong opinion on this one way or another, but feel it may prove an interesting topic for discussion. My initial gut feel is that the school should have done a better job of book selection or offered an alternative.
My immediate response is that she wants to have her cake and eat it, too. If she’s opposed, she should take the hit to her grades or drop the class; I don’t think the school is required to cater to her literary preferences. (She is “totally against” the book, meaning I guess that she thinks fictional characters should not have extramarital sex.) The point of class reading, I thought, was to have all the students (or a group of them) read the same book and discuss it with the teacher, sharing their impressions and views. That doesn’t work if the class reads one book and this girl reads another. And I think it’s fine for high schools to have required reading as a way to expose kids to new things.
Ms. Mercado also pushes one of my buttons by describing the book as “pornographic.” I’ve read it and it’s not pornographic. I thought it was one of the best I have read, especially the first two-thirds or so. There is definitely sexual content in there. It is absolutely not pornographic. Prudes through the ages have made this irritating mistake, sometimes by accident and sometimes on purpose. I’ll assume she is doing it by accident.
Frankly, she’s in high school and ought to be able to handle this even if she doesn’t like it. It’s not unreasonable for a 17- or 18-year-old to be asked to read and discuss a book that has some sexual content. On the other hand I think it’s unreasonable to ask schools to avoid great art and realistic writing because it might offend someone.
I’m trying to think of the reasons most of my high school English reading should have been thrown out. Night: upsetting depictions of concentration camps in the Holocaust (no way is that harder to take than sex); The Great Gatsby: alcohol bootlegging; Romeo and Juliet: teenage premarital sex, murder, sexual humor, apothecaries; Death of a Salesman: death; Catcher in the Rye: death, prostitution, underage drinking if I remember correctly; Wuthering Heights: boring…
I am having a hard time believing that a 17 year old American, of either sex, would ever use the words “Ewww, gross” in reference to sex. Certain sexual practices, possibly, but just sex in general? I mean, is this book filled with depictions of scat and fisting?
As one of the letter writers quoted in the story says, she obviously lacks some maturity.
In other subjects students have been able to opt out of doing things that they find objectionable. In science on particular, from avoiding having to pith the frog, to in Ob/Gyne residency programs in which residents can, on moral grounds, opt out of the abortion training component.
That said there is no easy way to offer an opt out in this case. The major part of that class is centered around group analysis of that text for a large part of that semester. She cannot participate in that class without reading that book. Allowing her to drop the class and switch into a different English class would be fair, but customizing the class to her limited sensibilities is unreasonable.
Separately, I would think that she does not belong at any of those higher level programs that she is allegedly receiving “recruitment letters from”. Even if she is exclusively a math nerd and wanting to go to MIT to study engineering, college requires that one have the willingness to expose oneself to ideas that you may not only disagree with but that you may find objectionable or even offensive. She has demonstrated that she has no such willingness.
Maybe Wheaton in Illinois would be a better fit for her.
Good for the district. If she wants control over her reading list, then maybe home schooling is best for her. If she is in public school, she gets zero say in the reading or the assignments.
Suck it up, you little whiner. Life doesn’t cater to your wants, and the sooner you learn that, the better.
This. If a student finds slavery offensive, can they exempt themself from reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Should a Marxist student be forced to read the depravity of upper class America in The Great Gatsby? And what if a student cannot tolerate poorly written turgid prose and badly developed characters? Should that exempt them from reading The Fountainhead, if assigned?
Of course a teacher could be very nice and give her the book to read with permission to skip particular sections that might offend her sensitive ears. She could even be told in advance which pages contain some moderately explicit language and allowed to hear/read key plot developments from those sections in an edited version. In return she would be required to do an extra assignment on the role of portrayals of sexuality in serious literature through history (which is possible to do without actual reading “offensive naughty bits”).
Of course that would require an understanding kind and amazing teacher responding to an intelligent sensitive polite student. Not likely with a kid who does come off as a whiny demanding entitled brat 'tis true.
There are other reasons to object to Uncle Tom’s Cabin that carry more weight, of course. Stowe writes about black people as if they were all innocent children and viewed today, some of it is rather offensive. And there’s the issue of Tom himself.
Kind of missing the point of what I am saying there. While there may be reasons that a book should not be required reading for high school students, the individual sensibilities of the high school student are not sufficient. If it is on the reading list, read the damn thing. Then write a critique of it. But reading it won’t harm you.
Perhaps her parents or minister could go through the book beforehand and black out the dirty bits (whilst the rest of the class is underlining them)?
I’m with villa – if she had any brains at all, she’d read it and write a top notch essay tearing it to pieces. But this is the world we’re living in. Believing in something doesn’t mean learning every angle to an issue and strengthening your arguments with debate and discussion. It’s la la la fingers-in-ears dogma.
Back at my (English) prep school, so when I was 11 I think, our English teacher actually did this to a book. The book was Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, and I was more than amused to come across pages where the word ‘shit’ had been crossed out and ‘dung’ written above it.
Almost 30 years ago, and I still remember the guys nickname - Pharisee Joe.
If she has a brain in her head and a leg to stand on, it should be trivially easy to write a paper on how the graphic sex scenes interfered with the narrative flow and how the context in which the sex happened negatively impacted the thematic aspects and/or plot arc of the novel. That is, if they actually did.
And hell no the girl doesn’t get her own book to read. It’s a class, not an independent study. Part of its importance lies precisely in the ability of students to express and defend their viewpoints, especially when they disagree. It would be possible to craft some sort of differentiated curriculum for her, allowing her to skip over sex scenes and create some sort of ‘extra credit’ side project, but I’m not sure that there’s even a need. And, in fact, it might be beneficial to avoid that sort of thing. What if the rest of the class does get around to talking about whether or not the sex scenes spoiled the narrative flow, or that they seemed more tacked on to sell copies of the book than advance the plot? Then she sits there and is ignorant of what they’re talking about, but could lecture them on the presentation of sex in Victorian literature?
How would she know that the “sexual imagery in the book is too graphic” if she hadn’t already read it? Or is she just basing it on what she’s heard others say about it?
If she’s already read it then the damage is done, and she may as well forget about schooling in her future. Time for her to invest in a pipe full of crack and license to whore. :rolleyes:
Presumably she’s read some of it and doesn’t want to read the rest. That’s a bit silly on its own, since I think the sex is mostly or entirely toward the end of the book. You probably have to read 2/3rds of it before you get there.
I’m a bit surprised at how one-sided this thread is.
I tried to find out how old the girl is, since that’s definitely relevant. According to the linked article, she’s apparently sixteen. At that age, she’s officially not even allowed to see an R-rated movie without parental accompaniment, so the idea that she shouldn’t be required to read a book with sex scenes in it isn’t that ridiculous.
We don’t make fourth-graders read Anais Nin. We don’t give out-and-out porn to minors. So there is a line, somewhere. Without knowing more about what’s actually in this book, and about this girl and her situation, I don’t know which side of the line this falls on. It’s quite possible that you’re all right and the girl should just “get over it,” but I haven’t read the “offending” passages, so I don’t know whether or not she has a valid objection.
She can go and see an R Rated movie with a parent or adult guardian. And lo and behold, she has an adult guardian, her teacher, setting her the book.
Teachers are incredibly wary these days of setting inappropriate material. Given the fact that her teacher, a trained professional, has set this book, I am willing to make the presumption that it is appropriate for the children. And from the look of it, she isn’t saying this book should not be taught in class. She is saying that she personally should be exempted from reading it. And it is because of sexual content. If someone did not want to read the Book Thief, or Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, because the themes of violence and extermination were too disturbing, they wouldn’t be even acknowledged.
