"Next week, class, we'll be reading the collected works of the Marquis de Sade."
In one of those moments where you can hardly believe your eyes, I was taken aback as I was reading today's Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. In the "City & Region" section on the front page, an article entitled "Of Choice and Content" is prominently featured detailing the seemingly unending saga of what materials are appropriate to be taught in our schools, specifically books in English classes.
Mostly everyone is familiar with the routine components of these types of articles. A school in the community is presently involved in a dispute with a parent or group of parents (However, I would argue that the offended individuals are mostly just that, lone parents with an ax to grind or a need to stir up the community over a trivial matter.) over the content of a particular book, story, poem, etc. Anti-censorship groups, ACLU and NCTE, come to the defense of the material. The book is usually removed, sometimes returned, and eventually the saga dissolves into obscurity. What this article featured that others usually overlook is the fact that students are not forced to read the offensive materials if parents object and alternate assignments are offered to take their place. This is all fine and good, and I think that it's easier to appease a parent by offering an alternate assignment rather than creating waves that will unnecessarily embroil the school in a protracted fight for the rights of their teachers to groom their students at the expense of exposing them to potentially offensive materials. It just makes good sense to avoid the hassle.
However, I can see the issue from both sides, and both sides, as much as it pains me, make their fair share of legitimate points. I can understand parents not wanting their children to read certain materials. The issue becomes problematic when they decide that not only should their children not be exposed to the materials but other parents children should not be as well. This is where parents are crossing a line that I'm not comfortable with, and I would assume that there are others who wish to voice their own opinions on the matter and are not in need of being aided by others in the raising of their children. Choices made on your behalf by others seems out of whack to me with how we should be operating.
On the other hand, it really sickens me to see the ACLU or NCTE spokespersons voice the standard party line with regards to how unethical censorship is and how this is just another step towards total censorship of all materials. Maybe I'm being harsh, but this seems to be unnecessarily paranoid in the face of a matter so trivial. When defending materials that are offensive, these groups point out that sometimes these passages are taken out of context and cannot be seen as such. You need to see the whole picture. Sure, I realize there are books that have themes that may be objectionable to some, but they are integral to the main thrust of the content. However, there are books with passages that are truly not appropriate, in my eyes, for high-school age readers that are not at all important for the relevance of the text to be apparent to everyone.
What it comes down to, though, is that both sides need to compromise with regards to the amount of latitude given and that which is restrained. This is easier said than done, but it's something they need to strive for.
Reading this article, though, I'm reminded of my own encounter with censorship, which I still disagree with to this day. As a student-teacher, I was teaching a class of tenth-grade academic English students. For one of my assignments, I wanted the class to read John Updike's story "A & P," a rather short-story that details the final day of the unnamed narrator as he quits his job at the local supermarket in protest over the treatment of three bikini-clad girls in the store. The only references to the girls that could be construed as being somewhat racy are those that refer to their "cans" and the descriptions of their nubile breasts. Hardly the most graphic descriptions around and nothing compared to the normal everyday language used by students. I wasn't, in the end, allowed to use the story after the teacher I was assigned with read the story and showed it to other teachers who taught higher level classes. It wasn't "appropriate" for this or any of the grade levels in the school. Odd, I thought, and rather enraged had to settle for a rather tame story by Kurt Vonnegut that was in the school approved text. I couldn't believe it because I was assuming that these students were mature enough to handle something this "racy" in their English class. How are they supposed to mature as students if we concentrate on only censoring ourselves and teaching them sterilized stories without any references to real life? That's what "A & P" was supposed to do, but it was not to be in this school.
Finally, this brings me back to the real reason for writing this post. Accompanying the article mentioned above is a picture that doesn't appear in the electronic version linked to above. It shows a stack of books, presumably among them are some of the most objected to texts, and includes Lord of the Flies, To Kill a Mockingbird, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The caption beneath reads as follows: These titles, long considered staples in American school literary education, are under attack for containing "questionable" material and may be removed from the curricula of some local school districts. What's striking about this is that among these "staples" of books, at the very bottom of the pile is American Psycho. I don't know if ironic is the proper adjective to apply here or not. I'll leave that for you to decide.