<p>A lot of this may also depend on the level of emotional response of the young person to what he/she is reading. As I understand it, that can be highly variable.</p>
<p>"A lot of this may also depend on the level of emotional response of the young person to what he/she is reading. As I understand it, that can be highly variable. "</p>
<p>The problem is that you will NEVER find a class in which every single student is on the same page emotionally and with the same level of maturity. Given that, there would be almost no case in which you could require ANY book with difficult or troubling subject matter. I think it would be wrong to offer up any possible troubling book to be banned, removed, or made “optional”. You end up with kids who are never challenged.</p>
<p>What it appears that this assignment attempted to do was offer a range of books on a range of topics, for reading a review. A sensitive kid could have chosen a less disturbing book-all one has to do is look online to find detailed reviews of almost any book. I fail to see, though, how upper high school students reading about race and the troubling times of the 50s, from communism to segregation, could EVER bee completely free of anything that would be a problem for an emotionally sensitive child.</p>
<p>Perhaps parents who want to filter out all troubling material would be best home schooling.</p>
<p>My D’s school requires some pretty heavy reading for middle and HS kids. They are always allowed to opt out. Most do not. In 7th grade they read Lord of the Flies, in 8th, the unabridged Anne Frank, about the Holocaust, but SEX! The kids focused on the real message of the book. I don’t think we give most kids enough credit.</p>
<p>Well, I’ll let you know what I think when i have read the book.</p>
<p>My mother taught The Invisible Man for years to 12th graders, including me. (I had read the book already, with her encouragement, several years before.) I loved it. There are all kinds of things I remembered about it, but sexual explicitness wasn’t one of them.</p>
<p>I just went and checked my kids’ copy. I see what QuantMech is talking about, but I have to say, that’s pretty thin stuff compared to the sexually explicit literature we students used to pass back and forth among ourselves, or read out loud to one another during free periods. This isn’t a book that is characterized by a lot of sexual content. It IS a tough read, and a central work of 20th Century American literature, which is why it’s an important part of the curriculum for strong students.</p>
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<p>However, those things you passed around or read in free periods were not things that you told your parents about, right? Of course, the conservative parents may see the “dirty” books on the class reading list and complain about them but remain naively or blissfully unaware of what their kids are reading, or talking about, or doing outside of class.</p>
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This is what I have been saying all along. I just find it astonishing that people would think they can force their individual views on an entire school or school district, or that they can choose “a la carte” the things they want their kids taught in the classroom. The ONLY failsafe solution for these people is homeschooling (or perhaps a private school with very rigid curricula that the parents can buy into before they enroll their kids).</p>
<p>Anyone focusing on the sexual content of this book is so completely missing its point that it’s really mind-boggling that any educated person would even try to get it censored/removed/banned. </p>
<p>This is about the harsh realities of poverty and race. If the sexual content is tripping someone up, they’re completely misguided. I refer back to the book itself: would we REALLY prefer to “make the white man happy” by LYING and pretending ugliness doesn’t happen?</p>
<p>ucbalumnus, actually, some of what we read in free periods came from our parents. My Dad read parts of Portnoy’s Complaint (no, not THOSE parts) to us at the dinner table, it was such an accurate portrayal of his youth in Newark. My mother was a big fan of Theodore Isaac Rubin’s epistolary novel of late teenage sexuality, Coming Out. And I am pretty certain that the copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that migrated to my room had originally been my parents’.</p>
<p>My parents certainly knew of my enthusiasm for Thomas Pynchon and John Barth – those were books too big to hide, and I spent a lot of time reading them. The inappropriate passages in Gravity’s Rainbow, V, The Sot-Weed Factor, and Giles Goat-Boy make The Invisible Man look like a Sunday school tract.</p>
<p>The complaining parents probably do not resemble your parents in this respect.</p>
<p>JHS, what did you make of the encounter with Sybil toward the end of the book?</p>
<p>Although I remember being a bit uncomfortable with the sex in Updike’s Rabbit Run, the most disturbing piece I read for a high school English class was Peter Schafer’s play Equus. The boy in the play has a sexual fascination with horses, whom he sees as godlike figures and upon whom he secretly rides naked in frenzied night visits before he eventually blinds 6 horses.</p>
<p>Disturbing but brilliant.</p>
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<p>My daughters grew up with Harry Potter, almost obsessed with the books, then later the movies; so it was quite disturbing when they were in London and went to see the play. Daniel Radcliffe (aka - Harry Potter in the movies) plays the boy in Equus and they saw him naked on stage! They knew he was in it, and knew the book/play, but just weren’t quite prepared for what they saw. I think D2 said she was glad their seats weren’t right up front.</p>
<p>Sigh. If only sex scenes were the real reason for banning Invisible Man. </p>
<p>But I think we can all agree to surmise that it wasn’t. My hunch is that a bunch of white administrators want to protect their white students not from sex, but from the anger and dismay of a black character in a book about the black experience in America. </p>
<p>We shall never “overcome” if we avoid the truth about the marginalization of an entire people within our society. That this is happening in the age of Obama shows just how far we have yet to go…</p>
<p>PS: Interesting timing of this thread. I just watched Malcolm X, Spike Lee’s (superb) biopic, and have been reading about X and some of his ideas which, while some of them obviously radical, give a lot of food for thought even in 21st century America where a man of color is President.</p>
<p>One parent complained so I think katliamom nailed it,</p>
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<p>Probably similar to the schools that teach that slavery was not an important cause of the civil war, despite these documents: [Declaration</a> of Causes of Secession](<a href=“http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html]Declaration”>http://sunsite.utk.edu/civil-war/reasons.html)</p>
<p>katliamom has nailed it.</p>
<p>And holy crap, ucb.</p>
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<p>(That is from the Mississippi document of 1861.) It’s just awful when the facts get in the way of the talking points, isn’t it?</p>
<p>I can’t speak to the motives of the woman who complained about the book. </p>
<p>Corresponding to the fact that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” sometimes a complaint about the treatment of women in a book is just a complaint about the treatment of women in the book. In this particular case, I think the book is otherwise worthwhile. As mentioned several times above, I support its presence in the school library. I still do not support its assignment to minors in a public school.</p>
<p>As a philosophical point, separate from the consideration of this particular book: Suppose that a work of literature helps a person to develop a sympathetic understanding of the obstacles faced by one marginalized group, at the cost of furthering the marginalization of another marginalized group. What do you think about its suitability for young people?</p>
<p>In my opinion, a book of that type would be a good book for adults to read. But it would need an extremely trustworthy discussion leader if it were to be assigned to minors.</p>
<p>I have seen “North Carolina” and “Raleigh” mentioned several times in this thread. North Carolina did not ban the book, and Raleigh had nothing to do with it. The Board of Education in Randolph County, one of 100 counties in the state, banned the book from that county’s school libraries. Raleigh is in Wake County. To my knowledge, the book has not been banned in any of the other 99 counties.</p>
<p>My mistake (among some others), due to careless reading. I noticed that the newspaper was a Raleigh newspaper, and didn’t pick up on the actual location.</p>