Once again, a Texas school board is over-reacting. The school board is in the West Texas town of Tuscola, and they are trying to engage in the time-honored practice of book banning. They want to treat a book as though it was poisonous, and the very touch of the book would cause children to become mindless murdering perverts.
The book is Child of God, written by pulitzer prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy in 1974. It is a novel of an outsider falsely accused of rape, who begins killing people and winds up living in a cave with the decomposing corpses.
The book was on a list compiled by Tuscola's English teachers for a pre-Advanced Placement class. But naturally, some parent complained and now the school board has banned the book and suspended one of the teachers. It doesn't seem to matter that most people in the town don't think the teacher did anything wrong, and want him re-instated.
School boards seem to cater to the lowest common denominator these days. They seem to want to protect our kids from the world, rather than educate them about it. They should be acting like educators, not nannies.
It's not like these were first graders. These are high school students, and whether their parents want to admit it or not, they are capable of reading about the harsh realities of our world and rationally discussing them. The world is not always a nice place, and these high school students have probably read worse in the newspapers or seen it on TV or in the movies.
Books are not the problem, no matter what their content. The problem is people who think everyone must share their own limited view of the world. The problem is those who would deny freedom of speech and thought.
There are so many challenges ahead for our society. Young people need to be prepared to meet these challenges yet the people charged with preparing them try to keep them ignorant.
ReplyDelete"Educators" make me crazy.