<p>When are small-minded folks going to understand that in America we don't ban literature in our classrooms simply because someone gets "upset?"</p>
<p>What were the board members in North Carolina thinking? One offered the lame excuse that the book was too hard for 11th graders to read! I thought that challenges, difficulty and expending extra effort was a hallmark of educating young minds.</p>
<p>News
'Invisible Man' ban is a failure to see</p>
<p>This all happened because of ONE parent’s concern that it was “too much” for her high school junior? Geez, isn’t that what homeschooling or religious schools are for?</p>
<p>Let me guess–it was the combination of perspectives on race and the use of the “M” word (Marxism) that made this poor mother fear for her child’s delicate sensibilities.</p>
<p>Hope they don’t have the internet in their home.</p>
<p>It would seem that North Carolina is trying to out-Texas Texas these days.</p>
<p>Have you read The Invisible Man with the eyes of a high-school junior or senior?
sally305, neither of the issues that you raised (perspectives on race nor Marxism) was an issue for our family when The Invisible Man was required reading. There is a section of the book that is so utterly raw in its sexual content that I could not post an excerpt from it in this forum. (I mean really, really raw.) Then quite a few of the high-school boys were essentially hooting about it during the class discussion.</p>
<p>I favor books being freely available in the public library, where people can make their own choices about reading. They could also stop reading a book if they are appreciating some of the mind-expanding messages, but find other elements too troubling to deal with, at their current age. </p>
<p>After a lot of thought about this issue, there are some books that I do not favor having as assigned reading. If a student attends a public school, then in essence the government is forcing the student to read the assigned books.</p>
<p>Since I just noticed that Raleigh banned the book from school libraries, I will add that I oppose that–I think the book should be available in the school libraries. But I would support a ban on having it as required reading in high school.</p>
<p>They have a long way to go, I think Texas legislator voted to remove any <em>non-white accomplishments/negative things whites did</em> from public school history textbooks 4 years ago.</p>
<p>My daughter read it senior year as a class assignment. I am not a big fan of the book and neither was she. However, I don’t think it should be banned from any library (HS or public). I also think there are far better titles to have as required classroom reading. I hate today’s High School required reading - most of them are horrible, depressing, etc.</p>
<p>You are right, barrk. Among other new “facts,” slavery never happened.</p>
<p>QuantMech, I see your point but it is naive to think that 16- or 17-year-olds haven’t read anything with sexual content or a controversial presentation of it. When I was that age, we read Lolita (at an evangelical Christian school, no less). Don’t think that would happen these days.</p>
<p>Also, how can schools teach ANYTHING if parents have a say in every bit of the content? I have seen syllabi with books I liked and disliked and others I hadn’t read. I leave it to the teachers to present a broad range of perspectives in the classroom, and they generally do. There is no way we will all agree on what constitutes “good” literature that is worthy of being assigned to our kids.</p>
<p>I don’t know if we still have the book from high school or not. If so, I could try to track down the passage in question–but then, I don’t know what I’d do with it. I can’t post it, and if I tried to PM it, that would probably be a violation of the TOS, too. When I wrote “really, really raw,” about The Invisible Man, that is what I meant. (I would rate it as more shocking than the unexpurgated lyrics to “Get Low,” for example–don’t ask how I know about that!)</p>
<p>Please believe me that the section of the book is quite different from simply “having sexual content.”</p>
<p>Even if the majority of 16- or 17-year-olds have in fact encountered something that raw already, I think that there are differences in having it included in required reading in school. For one thing, that gives a sense that adult society thinks that it is perfectly normal, rather than shocking. Also, there will be some 16- or 17-year-olds who have not encountered material of that type, and I don’t think that it should be forced upon them in a public school.</p>
<p>It was a side effect of having the book assigned. The chief issue I have is with forcing students to read it. Sex is one thing. Non-consensual sex is different. Non-consensual sex with minors is different again. (I can no longer recall whether it was purely symbolic or real, in the novel.)</p>
<p>I acknowledge that The Invisible Man is a work of literature, even a great work of literature, and that it has important social content. I think that people should be permitted to approach it at a time that is right for them. For many sensitive students, high school is not it. I don’t think Ellison wrote the book with high school classrooms in mind.</p>
<p>“Geez, isn’t that what homeschooling or religious schools are for?”</p>
<p>My novel-reading daughter had read The Invisible Man long before what would have been 11th grade. By “11th grade”, she was already in college.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t bad The Invisible Man. I’d ban class assignments. Let the students choose what they want to read. Too often, as the data clearly show, assigned reading turns people off from reading forever.</p>
<p>I read it as an adult and don’t even remember the sex. So be it. I get the point about just what we expose kids to.</p>
<p>But, do you know what some are reading? My girls’ lists included suicide and cutting. As a young 'un, I was disturbed by Dostoyevsky and all the death in Camus- and not by, oh, say, the Group, which made the rounds of my hs class. Plenty of questionable themes in what even young kids are exposed to, from our childhoods to now. I used to roll my eyes at how all those Disney characters lost their mothers, leaving them alone. </p>
<p>Just saying. The issues of what they do and don’t read are problematic, with people on both sides of the issues.</p>
<p>Homeschooling isn’t all about religion-based isolation, btw. Though it is, for some.</p>
<p>No, it didn’t. Blaming this on a novel is a ridiculous notion. The teacher should have had control of the classroom. </p>
<p>From the sounds of this classroom, perhaps nearly everything would have been inappropriate. Lord of the Flies would have made it open season to poke other students with sticks and break their glasses.</p>
<p>S had a great English class in HS where everyone read a couple of shortish assigned books, but beyond that they chose their own reading. It was called Explorations in Literature, IIRC, and was part of the “AP Thread” of electives. So he could read Dostoievsky to his heart’s content. The teacher told me that she found that the students chose to challenge themselves in their reading, rather than opting for something “easy.”</p>
<p>This book was one of three students could CHOOSE for SUMMER reading. It was not read IN CLASS. In REAL LIFE high school kids, even from “good schools” in “good neighborhoods” are exposed to all kinds of REAL LIFE issues, like cutting suicide, sexual assault, and other crimes. The primary point of this book was the way blacks are viewed in segregationist society. Other real life topics happened to be included. If a kids in HIGH SCHOOL can’t handle it, maybe they need to be homeschooled. </p>
<p>And tetrahedron is dead on, although the book was not discussed IN CLASS in this case.</p>
<p>@tetrahedr0n, #17: The boys were discussing the novel–so to speak. In practice, it’s actually rather difficult to draw the line between simply analyzing the material that was presented in the book (with ample quotations from it) and sexual harassment.</p>
<p>I didn’t say that the boys were acting out scenes from the book–just discussing them in ways calculated to disturb the girls (while probably staying just inside the bounds of what the teacher considered to be acceptable discourse).</p>
Let the students choose what they want to read. Too often, as the data clearly show, assigned reading turns people off from reading forever.</p>