Alaska school removes 'The Great Gatsby' from curriculum for 'controversial' content

[yortsed snacilbuper]

An Alaska school board removed five famous — but allegedly "controversial" — books from district classrooms, inadvertently spurring renewed local interest in the excluded works.

"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou, "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller, "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien, "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison were all taken off an approved list of works that teachers in the Mat-Su Borough School District may use for instruction

The school board voted 5-2 on Wednesday to yank those works out of teachers' hands starting this fall. The removed books contained content that could potentially harm students, school board vice president Jim Hart told NBC News on Tuesday.

It'd be unfair to ask teachers to have to navigate their pupils through the complicated subject matter.

link

[gratuitous]

1. But Atlas Shrugged is still on the list, right?

Along with the Turner Diaries and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

[JDC]

10. No kidding

[virgogal]

2. When I was a teen the banned

books would be on my “must read” list.

[Mariana]

15. Me too.

There were a bunch of us who read the banned books while we were at school, openly and ostentatiously. Most of the teachers heartily approved. The public library was on our side, too, because they always had plenty of copies of all the banned books available.

[Solomon]

3. The Invisible Man by Ellison?!

Wow. I hope someone can summarize the reasons for each of these books. I really don't want to hurt my brain searching through the article. (Assuming they said why these books have been removed).

[JDC]

11. They are against Horror Film books

[dawg day]

4. I recently re-read Gatsby and realized what I'd missed the high-school time--

Nick (the narrator) has a rendezvous/hookup with another man. It's kind of no big deal-- just a mention at the end of a scene-- and Nick, while the narrator, is not the main character. Went right by me when I was a kid!

I probably would have been more interested if I'd noticed!

[NameAlreadyTaken]

8. A professor once told me that the key

to "The Great Gatsby" is that the narrator is lying. I haven't been able to figure this out yet.

[Mike 03]

5. When I was a junior in high school at one point during the year our teacher said,

"Now, read whatever you want but you have to write a paper about it" so I read The World According to Garp, which I know for a fact the Alaska school board would not have approved. But the point is I could have read The Exorcist if I'd wanted to, or Naked Lunch. She just wanted us to fall in love with reading. I hope some schools still teach that way.

[bronxiteforever]

6. "A Christmas Carol" too

“The Jungle" and "A Christmas Carol" could be interpreted as advocating for socialism.

All of this literature and poetry will outlive the 5 on the board. The 5 will be worm food while people will still read all of those wonderful books. Teens will still gasp when they first read the stunning last line Fitzgerald wrote in Gatsby:

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

[LakeArenal]

7. When I was young the hush-hush book was

Lady Chatterley's Lover.

I have to say it was way over my head. Then.

[Solomon]

9. Yep. But I still can't figure out why.

Lol

[kskiska]

13. There was nothing over my head in Peyton Place

I read my mother's copy whenever she went out.

[yortsed snacilbuper]

12. This is the list of books Mayor Sarah Palin tried to have banned.

As many of you will notice it is a hit parade for book burners.

This information is taken from the official minutes of the Wasilla Library Board.

When the librarian refused to ban the books, Palin tried to get her fired.

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Blubber by Judy Blume
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
Carrie by Stephen King
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Christine by Stephen King
Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Cujo by Stephen King
Curses, Hexes, and Spells by Daniel Cohen
Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Decameron by Boccaccio
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Fallen Angels by Walter Myers
Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure) by John Cleland
Flowers For Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Forever by Judy Blume
Grendel by John Champlin Gardner
Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling
Have to Go by Robert Munsch
Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
Impressions edited by Jack Booth
In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
It’s Okay if You Don’t Love Me by Norma Klein
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
Little Red Riding Hood by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Love is One of the Choices by Norma Klein
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
More Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
My Brother Sam Is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
My House by Nikki Giovanni
My Friend Flicka by Mary O’Hara
Night Chills by Dean Koontz
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
One Day in The Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Ordinary People by Judith Guest
Our Bodies, Ourselves by Boston Women’s Health Collective
Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy
Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl
Scary Stories 3: More Tales to Chill Your Bones by Alvin Schwartz
Scary Stories in the Dark by Alvin Schwartz
Separate Peace by John Knowles
Silas Marner by George Eliot
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
The Bastard by John Jakes
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
The Devil’s Alternative by Frederick Forsyth
The Figure in the Shadows by John Bellairs
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Snyder
The Learning Tree by Gordon Parks
The Living Bible by William C. Bower
The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
The New Teenage Body Book by Kathy McCoy and Charles Wibbelsman
The Pigman by Paul Zindel
The Seduction of Peter S. by Lawrence Sanders
The Shining by Stephen King
The Witches by Roald Dahl
The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Snyder
Then Again, Maybe I Won’t by Judy Blume
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary by the Merriam-Webster Editorial Staff
Witches, Pumpkins, and Grinning Ghosts: The Story of the Halloween Symbols by Edna Barth

[kskiska]

14. Funny, but Lolita is not on the list.

But then, I don't believe there's a dirty word in Lolita. It's a very well-written book.

[abqtommy]

16. I guess that if being objectionable is the criteria Alaska will also ban Faux Snooze and any

Last edited Thu Apr 30, 2020, 10:34 AM - Edit history (1)

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