You Can’t Read That! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups.
When this high school principal says “Parents should have the right to determine what their students are exposed to in the classrooms,” what she really means is that parents of a few students get to set school policy on what any student is exposed to. Pulled from classrooms: Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.
High school book-banning campaigns in New Jersey have targeted Ariel Dorfman’s play Death and the Maiden, Bernard MacLaverty’s novel Cal, John Green’s young adult novel Looking for Alaska, and, just for good measure, “any other material that is not age appropriate.” Some good news: a review committee has ruled that Death and the Maiden and Cal will stay on the reading list at Rumson-Fair Haven Regional High School.
A proposed Louisiana law would force online booksellers to verify users’ ages before showing them titles of books in their catalogs deemed “harmful to minors.” Uh, who exactly does the deeming?
Portage, Indiana, high school administrators are bravely allowing drama students to put on a production of The Bad Seed … so long as they rewrite the script to to remove references to drugs, alcohol, and sex.
Closely related to the Indiana incident is the growing trend of schools redacting books to head off the possibility of parental challenges. When the parent of a student at Nashville Prep, Tennessee, challenged the assignment of David Benioff’s City of Thieves, the school responded with this statement: “Every scholar has received a redacted version of the book. … We changed scenes involving ‘sex’ to scenes involving ‘kissing.’ We changed curse words like ‘s**t’ to ‘poop.’ We also redacted whole sections that involved mature scenes.”
Have you ever had a post removed from Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram? OnlineCensorship.org wants to hear from you.
Mount Horeb Area School District, Wisconsin, canceled a reading of children’s book I Am Jazz after a conservative Christian organization threatened to sue. The issue? I Am Jazz is about a transgender child. Here, the author responds.
Parents of a sixth-grader in Rosemount, Minnesota, are demanding the removal of Just One Day by Gayle Forman from all school district libraries, citing “a graphic sex scene, underage drinking [and] date rape.” Because it’s easier to purge school libraries of anything potentially offensive than to monitor what your kids bring home to read, apparently.
Residents of Wasilla, Alaska, demanded the removal of an LGBT-friendly book from the juvenile nonfiction shelves of the public library. End-running the library’s review process, city residents stormed a city council meeting, accusing the librarian of being a pedophile and demanding the book be banned outright, saying they don’t want “gay books” or books about gay people in the library at all. The librarian wound up moving the book, along with 300 others, to the adult shelves of the library, but the landscape is littered with bad feelings and many issues remain unresolved.
Factual errors in school textbooks? So what?
“I just have concerns that it’s too graphic, even though these are Muppets characters,” Carney said. “Unfortunately in this world there is a lot of war and strife and poverty; I understand that. I just don’t know how appropriate that is to be teaching that to 5-year-olds.” School board member wants a Muppets book removed from the kindergarten curriculum.
Are you ready for the Monty Pythonesque recitation of social justice buzzwords and call for limits on free speech issued by students at New York’s Hamilton College? Here’s a sample to whet your appetite (or send you running to Fox News for an anti-PC innoculation, depending): “We, the Students of Hamilton College, demand the end of the inevitable tokenization of all marginalized bodies at Hamilton College.” Oh! Come and see the violence inherent in the system! Help! Help! I’m being repressed!
To end on a lighter note, here are some banned book tattoos. More here.
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