Burbank Unified School District in California recently made headlines with its decision to ban the classic novels “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Of Mice and Men,” “The Cay, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry,” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” District leaders apparently responded to several complaints from parents who took issue with the purported racism of the books as well as incidents of white students taunting their nonwhite peers with racist language from their assigned reading.
Yet, in an effort to limit the controversy, removing these books from their approved reading lists only brought even more attention to the matter. Many people, including members of PEN America, expressed outrage at rejecting well-known classics because of a few parents who were offended and a few students acted stupidly.
These are good novels that take a sympathetic view of minorities with well-developed characters and realistic stories. And, a rarity in most classic novels, they also happen to be age-appropriate in their language and subject matter. For this reason, these books serve not just as good, but ideal resources for discussing sensitive issues.
While this is all true, it misses the real reason behind removing these titles. Sure, BUSD clearly hopes to quell the complaints of angry parents and avoid a negative image, but their long-term goal is part of a much larger trend in education: eliminating the very idea of classics and turning assigned reading into a form of indoctrination. more here
Beautiful downtown Burbank?
I had a girlfriend that had a classic navel. It looked like Hukklebery Finn, yet it smelled just like Gorgonzola….Crawdad’s loved her….
Aaron, near the Burbank Bank in beautiful downtown Burbank, right across from Burbank’s famous restaurant row and Vinnie Abruchie’s Little Touch of Newark.
I wish there were some way to make them include in the curriculum…
1984, by George Orwell
The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal, by Ayn Rand
The Road To Serfdom, by Friedrich Hayek
What Has Government Done to Our Money?, by Murray Rothbard
Unintended Consequences, by John Ross
Enemies Foreign and Domestic, by Matt Bracken
Aaron Burr – Yep. Near Johnny Carson park.
@Aaron Burr — This article made me think of the deliberately induced ignorance, lack of critical thinking skills, and general absence of work ethic and productivity of the majority of those poor, benighted products of the govt’s mandatory indoctrination centers, a/k/a public “schools”.
And THAT prompted me to mention to you that just today I was using one of our prized THANK ME FOR YOUR EBT CARD tote bags from EvilConservative days of long ago. Thanks!
i like the tote bag. Where/when was the evilconservative days? A website somewhere?
@ Uncle Al, Discrimination & Disparities, by Thomas Sowell.
Dispelling the Race hustlers with facts and truth.
@Charlie WalksonWater — Yes, it was a web site run by Aaron Burr. It was similar in some ways to IOTW.
@OceanSailor — Sowell is a national treasure. I have given away multiple copies of his Basic Economics: A Citizen’s Guide to the Economy, which appeared in 2000.
To be replaced by the likes of “Dreams of my Communist father” and “Curious George joins BLM?”
Why in the hell is WordPress censoring my every comment? I hate the left.
Well, I finally got thru. Uncle Al, add Witness by Whittaker Chambers, The Roots Of American Order and The Conservative Mind by Russell Kirk and Mere Christianity by CS Lewis and Orthodoxy by GK Chesterton to your list of books.
Why ban them?
I suspect they’ve been collecting dust on the shelf, just waiting to be assigned reading, cuz that’s the only way it’s going to move.
Book banners become book burners and then start stuffing people in ovens. Happens every time.
“The Law,” a work written by the French political philosopher and economist Frederic Bastiat in 1850, investigates what happens in a society when the law becomes a weapon used by those in power to control and enslave the population.
Has “Fahrenheit 451” been banned yet?