« Kwame's history with charters | Main | Education News for Thursday, March 29 »
March 28, 2007
Naughty books
NYC Educator raises that thorny and perennially unresolved question regarding controversial literature in the classroom:
Explicit sex and extreme violence grace the pages of many books approved by New York City. Is that a bad idea? Is it a good idea? Will it get kids who wouldn't read otherwise interested?
I discovered the post via this week's Carnival of Education over at the Wonks, who makes what I consider an important distinction: "Should high schools remove books from their libraries and reading lists if they deem them too sexually explicit? Even if such books are considered to be 'classics?'"
As I say, this is one of those debates that will never end, largely because what's really at issue is individual values. I think one reason these debates keep surfacing in schools is that parents, who are (and should remain) the final arbiters of the values that are taught to their children, keep getting denied a say in these matters. To that end, let the parent decide. As to whether such books should be assigned as part of a curriculum, let parents opt their kids out if they so choose; it's done (or should be done) in the case of sexual education, so I think extending this sort of provision to other classroom content is easily done and entirely appropriate. In the case of making such materials available in the school library, how about putting them under restricted use such that the student can only access the material with parental consent? Put this ball back in the parent's court, where it belongs.
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.edspresso.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-t.cgi/1331
Comments
I'd probably avoid teaching such books, even though they're approved, but if kids were to go out and read them on their own, I guess I'd be happy they were reading at all. As an ESL teacher, I look for books that use contemporary language.
Personally, I don't like to teach books that use racial epithets, like "Of Mice and Men," because I'd hate to think it was I who introduced these kids to them. I also recoil at the blatant anti-Semitism in some British "classics," even though it was the coin of the realm back then.
A great, great series we might agree on is the "No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency" by Alexander McCall Smith. If you haven't seen it yet, you should run out and read it. It's wonderful. I taught the first volume to a group of ESL students who'd largely never read a book before in English, and it worked very well.
Posted by: NYC Educator | March 30, 2007 08:02 AM
