Actually, I haven’t seen anyone answer the question Urbanredneck posed at the start: Would I want to send my kids to “Public School Social Justice Factory” Edina Public Schools?
Given what I know of their alumni, teachers, and families, given the years I’ve worked in Edina - fuck yes, if I had kids. Unfortunately, I haven’t found the pussy-hat-wearing feminist Marxist to become Mrs. Squirrel, so the kids aren’t quite a reality yet. But a PUBLIC school that sends almost 19 out of every 20 graduates on to college has definitely earned my regard. It may be located in “Every Day I Need Attention”, surrounded by bloviating narcissists regularly referred to as “cake eaters”, to quote Mighty Ducks, but they’re doing a phenomenal job at providing a first-rate education to children and preparing them for life beyond a diploma.
Somehow, several of our local conservatives have a problem with that. I’d be shocked, but #MAGA.
Well, I understand there are only so many books you can have on a reading list. What I do hae a problem with is when people want to remove them because they find them offensive. Whether it’s Huck Finn, Of Mice and Men, Inherit the Wind, etc. THAT is what upsets me. People who complain about language or ideas they might find offensive. I loathe censorship.
Find alternatives because hey, we thought this was a really good choice, and we decided to use it instead – no big deal.
It strikes me, looking at what Duluth has decided to teach, that they have combined U.S. Civics with American Lit. Minnesota does not require Civics, and it is sorely lacking in many of our public schools. I’d rather have a Civics class than shoehorn it into Lit (when did Supreme Court decisions become Literature?), but I think that is where they are going.
I teach in a public school. I think that having students buy texts is more common than not; I don’t know what the actual policy/law is here, but I think in general you can ask students to buy materials for a class as long as it’s not an absolute requirement for graduation: so art can charge a $30 materials fee as long as theater or choir are free and also can be used to fill the Fine Arts requirement.
Teachers will say that they work with kids who can’t afford the books, and I think that that helps many kids, but others just don’t even ask or know that they can.
Why? I understand not censoring what’s available in a school library, or a public library, and I certainly wouldn’t stand for a book to be prohibited on campus if a student brought a copy, but I don’t like to teach I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings because I find the graphic rape of an 8 year old to be uncomfortable, and because I don’t think I should be mandating students read it. I also think it’s disrespectful to reduce such a story to a school assignment. I also, frankly, think very few teachers have any business teaching Huck Finn because they mangle it so badly that it becomes offensive. I can think of tons of books that have literary merit that have no business in a high school classroom.
To be honest, it probably has more to do with those books giving teenagers the excuse to say “nigger” far more than is actually necessary for a literary discussion than actual censorship.
That’s one of the reasons why I would advocate replacing it with a book from the perspective of a young minority in the inner city. It will probably have that word, and quite likely other words, but they would be used in a more contemporary fashion, and not seem as easy to get away with.
One of the points of fiction is to create empathy. It allows readers to put themselves in the shoes of the characters in the book. A book that replaced Finn with a young black orphan, moving from home to home, even running away for a time, and living in the inner city areas of several different cities, and showing the different cultures of all the different people he comes into contact with would serve a similar purpose, but also give students a new perspective. Rather than the entitled white student seeing inner city black populations as one monolithic culture that is oft times labeled as “toxic”, they would see that there is value in these people, that they have their own hopes and dreams, just like the student. I have no idea if this book exists.
I would replace 'Mockingbird with a court drama about police abuse. Get the same ideas, but more relevant to the times we’re living in.
It depends on the reason people find them offensive and what they are going to replace them with. The NAACP has a problem with then N word - and I suspect particularly in the context (used by white people and written by white authors) - they don’t have a problem with books that have a racial focus being taught. And it sounds like that is more or less the issue in Duluth
One of my favorite novels is Lolita - for some of the same reasons I love TKAM or Passage to India - the prose reads like poetry. And its a wonderful study of Americana. (And, of course, you can do a good psychoanalytic, feminist or marxist reading out of it - there is a lot of material to work with). Its on my list of books everyone should read during their lives - but probably not in high school. That isn’t censorship - its common sense - there are other books that you can study prose as poetry - like E.M.Forester - and anyone who is interested in Literature is going to come across Lolita eventually. The value of Lolita specifically is not worth the hassle of even trying to cut the politics.
And I don’t think that is really because Lolita has material in it that high school students don’t know about - my high schoolers certainly were exposed to worse - the nightly news exposes you to worse - we just saw the news filled with a man who sexually abused some of the most famous young women in our country when they were minors - and abused hundreds more. But because we want to BELIEVE they haven’t been exposed to it. (And on edit - as Manda JO says, it isn’t fair to teachers or to students to require them to read/teach it).
You don’t just select books for their content, though. Huck Finn fills a lot of gaps: it’s a satire, and you need to read satire. It’s a satire of Romanticism, so it works really well as a counter point to Benito Cereno or The Scarlet Letter or Frankenstein, because it’s openly mocking the exact aesthetic they were embracing. It’s a great precursor to Gatsby, because Gatsby is all about the tension between the Lost Generation and their own lost idealism/Romantic tendencies. It’s a good introduction to Realism, and the ideals of verisimilitude and regionalism (which again contrasts nicely with Romanticism). It’s a picaresque, which is a narrative structure worth talking about. It has an unreliable narrator that isn’t too hard to unpack. Kids also like it and can generally understand it, which is worth a great deal. And finally, it’s really well done. It really is a profoundly clever work of art.
Honestly, I keep teaching Huck because I think it can be done well, because I think I do it well, and because there really is no substitute I’m happy with considering what I am trying to do with my course. TKMB, on the other hand, I can easily find substitutes for.
You are convincing me to re-read Huck - I’ve only read it once and remember hating it. Its on my short list of books I REALLY disliked - anything by Thomas Hardy hits that list as well. But I read it at least 30 years ago.
Well I think it depends upon the amount of social justice. Plus it depends upon the attitudes of the teachers.
Lots of issues were brought up when I was in school in the 70’s and 80’s. Either within reading stories in english class to reading about things in history. We also did current issues in 7th and 8th grades thru a weekly friday newspaper discussion.
I really dont think schools have the time to really go into social issues. They barely have enough time to cover the basics.
I agree that in many ways it might be the best district in the state.
However it looks like this all started only about 4 years ago and many parents are starting to see a slide. Sometimes the culture of a school can change pretty quick with one principal.
Frankly if there was an issue starting to form, its good that its getting out. If it was nothing then the school will get by.
You can’t teach kids to write if they don’t have anything to say. This is just a central fact of teaching writing. It’d be like trying to teach carpentry but not letting the kids actually build anything: “We are just going to hammer boards into nails and sand 2x4s in random directions until you get to college. Maybe then you’ll be ready to make boxes and things. Just nails for now!”.
Furthermore, can you not see that maybe a very good school in a very good district, a school where 19/20 kids go to college, might be a place where they need to move beyond the basics? Those kids probably have subject/verb agreement down.
Schools that don’t go into social issues are, IMIO, failing students. The challenge is to find a way to incorporate them into relevant, multidisciplinary lessons.
So as a read-aloud, I always start with Bud, Not Buddy. It’s a helluva good adventure story, great for teaching about character traits and relationships and plot structure. It also allows students to learn about racism, class esgregation, unions and labor struggles, the Great Depression, geography, and big band jazz music.
As a writing exercise, we write letters to local government. It allows students to learn the difference between facts and opinions, the difference between an unsupported opinion and a supported opinion, paragraph structure, and letter structure. It also allows students to learn about Google Docs, about local government structures, about active citizenship, and about issues like traffic flow, pollution, child labor laws, and the like.
Public schools must teach students about social issues.
If you want kids to develop as writers, they need to feel passionately about something. They need to feel like they are saying something that matters. They need some skin in the game. If you treat social issues as verboten, if you make school into some Bizzaro Disneyland, where we pretend the world is great and don’t talk about anything that might make anyone uncomfortable, or about which people will disagree, then you won’t teach anyone anything. School needs to be relevant. How can it be relevant if you declare everything that matters to be off limits?
In fact, if you are teaching kids that everything is all sunshine, lollypops and rainbows, then you are still pushing a political viewpoint that things are as they are supposed to be.
Urbanredneck, could you please give us your definition of “social issues?”
Then, if you don’t mind, please tell me which social issues I should avoid in my classroom with regards to any of the following topics. This is a pretty broad list, so feel free to pick any or all as suits you best:
German civilians and the Holocaust
McCarthyism
Spanish Conquistadors in the New World
Jim Crow
Pre-war immigration laws
Progressive Era reforms (take your pick - food safety, environmentalism, women’s suffrage, whatever)
Heliocentrism
You’ve met teenagers, I take it?