School District in California Considers Ban on Classic Books
“The District has apparently violated its own regulations by instructing teachers to stop using the books while it assesses the merits of the challenge.”
Have you noticed that the left often actually does the things that they accuse the right of wanting to do?
The National Coalition Against Censorship reports:
California School District Considers Ban on Classic Books
NCAC is urging the Burbank Unified School District in Burbank, CA, to retain several books in their curriculum and allow teachers to teach the books while they are under review. The challenged books include Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, Theodore Taylor’s The Cay, and Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.
Burbank USD policy states that, when a book is challenged, the book should remain in use while the challenge is pending. The District has apparently violated its own regulations by instructing teachers to stop using the books while it assesses the merits of the challenge. Parents who file complaints are permitted to ask for alternative assignments for their own students, but should not dictate what all students in the District are allowed to read.
The books in question grapple with complicated and difficult realities of America’s past and present. But curricula have been developed that make it possible to teach the books with sensitivity and compassion. Both The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird are included on the Library of Congress list of “Books That Shaped America” and have been taught in schools throughout the country for many years. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry was awarded the prestigious Newbery Medal in 1977. The Cay is an award-winning young adult novel that tells the powerful story of how an 11-year-old boy learns to reject the racist views of his upbringing and to recognize the humanity of those normally deemed the “other” by society.
At a time when hundreds of thousands of Americans are in the streets protesting systemic racism, it is more important than ever for educators to teach books that help their students understand the role that race has played in American history and how it continues to shape our society.
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Comments
Roll of Thunder is the best book to use to teach young white children about racism. The protagonist is relatable to the child – has a loving family and annoying brothers. It is AFTER the reader starts to identify with the character that you see the first racism when the girl is pushed off the sidewalk by a mean white man. Every time I read it with a new child, there is shock – why would a man do that to a little girl. And we start a conversation about how we are the same, and about how racism is bad.
Maybe THAT is why it must be banned – it starts building bridges between people, and we cannot have that /sarc
But if the child is shocked, why does the child need to read the book? The child is showing that he or she is not racist, already.
I guess all it does is to let the teacher tell the student that other white people are racist. I wouldn’t approve of that message.
Some books need banning from a school setting. Such as Howard Zinn’s so-called “history”.
I’m OK with having Zinn’s book used in classes for older students — as an example of biased history.
It’s when it’s presented as the unvarnished truth that I object.
At some point, students do need to be exposed to uncomfortable facts and their exploitation in propaganda, and be taught how to think critically about it.
My son is allowed to choose a few books for his book reports and I suggested he look into “A Confederacy of Dunces” which is in my top-10 list of books that I would like him to read. I can only imagine where it sits on the scale of “uncomfortable racism in history.” I gave him Catch-22 at the beginning of the shutdown because I can think of no other book which so perfectly captures the illogic of how blue states are run these days.
I assume they will remove all the offending books from the school libraries and burn them in the street at the next BLM/Antifa riot.
Libraries that were cathedrals of knowledge have changed into dens of propaganda. Noticeably during the Oblahma oppression period, public libraries, including college libraries, began to quietly “disappear” certain books that were deemed too conservative, too factually historic- anything that didn’t match their narrative was “moved to the basement”, “discarded because the binding got old”, “moved to a backroom” to make room for shiny new socialist propaganda, race baiting, history rewrites, leftist literature, biographies of socialist and race baiting heroes; and sexual deviance. Periodicals and newspaper subscriptions magically began to contain mainly progressive publications. Where before there may have been 50 different books about the U.S. Constitution and U.S. founding and values, the collection is reduced to a few manufactured socialist interpretations.
What can you do to stop this societal disintegration? Contact the library boards and request equal representation of materials, check out any unbiased materials that are available to keep them in circulation/popularity, buy conservative books and donate them to the library, work for the library yourself to shape their decisions, work for the Dept. of Education, or run for your local school board. Other ideas anyone? What can we do? Lawsuit?