No, I said having people remove content because of their subjective viewpoint on what is and isn't "offensive" is a corrosive, slippery slope of censorship, whose apologists want that done under shallow guise of making literature study more"palatable" to short attention spans and narrow minds. As for choice, as I previously stated no one is telling students they can "only" read specific books - again, what I am railing against are the intentional blacklisting of books due to the the endlessly growing list of things that someone somewhere has subjectively decided are "offensive."
Or put another way, people need to be reminded that our bill or rights does not contain any clause whatsoever stating there is a right to "never be offended."
And they still can CHOOSE to read this book. It is not banned from the shelves. If the media would have just shut up it would have stayed pretty much a non issue.
Biloxi school district still has required reading lists. They just removed one book. That's it. I am sure other books have been removed in the past. Times change, people change, book lists change. It's ok. (My child did not have a required reading list per se and yet has a 3.8 GPA at the moment, who woulda thunk it)
How long do you think it should be before a school replaces one book with another? 50 years? 100 years? I mean a lot of books have been written since TKAM. Are you seriously saying that none of them have been as good or as teachable or as valuable?
I didn't even read the last article from the Sun Herald but apparently some parents thought there was a problem that the book was causing. Maybe these particular kids are too immature to handle the subject of the book. I don't know, not their teacher.
I personally, am not offended by the book. I don't know why they are as I didn't read the last article. But until they start actually banning the book or burning it, I still remain amazed that we are even having this conversation.
The list for this one class cannot possibly include all of the classics. Put another on that list and put TKAM in a later grade. Gee Whiz. Mountains out of molehills.
ETA: Ok, I read the article. So these ladies complained about a situation and the child was given alternative material. They thought it was done. Obviously there is more to the story. Maybe other complaints. Maybe after discussing it with the teacher they decided it was better to pull it.
I still maintain that if it was any other time, in any other state, it would remain a non issue.