guyy

I once read some books by a couple of German exiles that got me to thinking that the current social arrangements needed a fundamental re-working. I've heard that they used to confiscate these books in places like Singapore. I don't think the fear of political subversion was entirely unjustified.

That's why i don't like the argument that books are harmless. "Catcher in the Rye" was a big fuck you to mid-20th c. America, by one of its own, and in its own idiom. Why else do teens like it so much? I'm quite sure that the book did pervert many American youth -- and that's all to Salinger's credit.

ottopilot

You're funny. Tell me another story uncle roachboy.

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loquitur

I don't know about you guys, but when I was a kid, every time I read a "naughty" book it was a fierce disappointment. I don't know what I was expecting, though.

mixedmedia

I...don't...remember him fondling her...can't recall her name...but it's been about 20 years since I read it. If I feel like later, I might look it up. But I'm certainly not here to defend the actions of Bigger Thomas.

Obviously, this book was not written for young children. But teenagers in the upper grades of high school are certainly familiar enough with murder to be able to stomach this novel. Any attempt to 'protect' teenagers from this material is arbitrary at best and politically motivated at worst. I don't find either of those reasons to be valid.

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Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

Willravel

Liq, did you like The Sun Also Rises? It's probably one of the best books I've ever read in my life. I'll bet you it's banned in places.

thespian86

Sorry, my argument isn't that the message is harmless, it's that the message is more important then the taboo placed on it. I was obviously not born into Salinger's time, but I think the novel was meant as a reflection of the unspoken lives that young men were living at that age. When you were growing up, you had sexual thoughts, yes? Was it because you read about it, or was it natural? Salinger gave voice to a sexually repressed and emotionally sheltered generation who couldn't express it themselves; that's all. By calling it perverted is missing the point I think. Although, maybe I misunderstood.

Have you ever read Frank Wedekind's play Spring Awakening. It was written in 1890. It involves physical and sexual abuse, homosexuality, suicide, abortions, rape, and child abuse. People banned it. Although, they were missing the point. It was about a socially repressed group of individuals who, without being taught properly about life, began to try to find their own answers and ended up fucking themselves up. It's about ignorance for the sake of ignorance and tradition; to try to impede social evolution. A lot like the story Salinger penned for an equally repressed group of individuals generations later.

Most of it is meant to be ironic. If anything they were advocating education to save the secret lives their children were living, and they were ignoring; they wanted the botched abortions, and failing out of school, and hiring hookers, and suicides, etc, to end. And they wanted to let the world know that someone would say out loud "This is happening".

What happens when you ban materials is you are backhandedly allowing teens and children to go uneducated. Or a whole state. Or a whole Country.

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filtherton

All I can say is that, given the state of the public schools in my area, I don't expect any of my kids to be exposed to anything even remotely resembling culture in terms of curriculum-- culture gets in the way of teaching kids to pass standardized tests (thanks NCLB). I'm not afraid to buy books and I'd rather be the person to help my present and future kids put things in context, as opposed to some teacher who I might not agree with.

Ustwo

You know I think this may be what the real argument should be.

Is it a public schools job to teach 'culture'.

From my perspective no. We have awful math scores, horrible geography skills, almost no grasp of history, and mediocre scientific knowledge. We have a population thats more superstitious and believing of paranormal activities than we had in the 1960's.

If you want to work a book like Black Boy into the lesson plan on the civil rights movement, or Animal Farm into the Russian revolution thats great, but as a backdrop for the facts, not as a end itself.

It is grossly apparent that kids need to learn what the real cost of items are with a credit card at 19.9% interest is and I won't lose sleep if they cancel poetry class in order to drum that sort of information home.

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Baraka_Guru

And I'm sure there are few students who can comfortably write a complete sentence, let alone a paragraph. You left out literacy and the value of teaching language arts. Without these, how can we expect students to communicate with any effectiveness? Language arts have an impact on the other disciplines in this regard. What do we do in language arts? We teach reading and writing. What do we have them read? Grammar textbooks? Maybe we should. But if the students can't grasp mathematics, they might have a tougher time with pure grammar.

So how do we teach them? With creative works such as stories and novels. But these aren't just about grammar, they are about culture. So why not teach culture at the same time? It makes things more interesting. (And to exclude certain works for content or topics via banning is something I oppose, as it opposes certain realities.) We don't teach geography from a pure land & water perspective. There is some culture in there as well. History? Culture. When reading literature, we emphasize culture because that is its raison d'etre. But it isn't the only value.

--This is more of a ramble than anything, so I hope it makes sense.

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Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
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dc_dux

If "teaching culture" by using modern literature as the basis for stimulating classroom discussions to help students better understand the diversity of the country in which they will live and work....it seems to me to be a good use of school time and resources.

It might even enlighten students and end some of those superstitions...they might learn that if a classmate has two dads, it doesnt mean the classmate is more likely to "become" gay.

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roachboy

there is a philosophical question that ustwo raises that is interesting (filtherton raised it as well) concerning the value of standardized testing/test scores in evaluating an educational programme. that seems important enough to maybe warrant another thread....

personally i am not at all persuaded that these scores measure anything.

anyway, even if they did, they would be beside the point in a debate like this over banning books...

basically, i agree with baraka guru that the central function of education is to enable students to think independently and creatively about the world, about themselves--and to provide them with a sense that they too can make things and by making things make the world Otherwise.

history is not simply a repository of factoids: it is a relation to information, it is procedures for ordering it--but most of all it provides a set of tools for thinking *through* information, *with* information. presenting history in the history channel mode as a spectacle that in no way impacts upon the spectator is close to worthless from this viewpoint, except insofar as it provides purty pictures for the entirely passive consumer to look at.

in a democratic polity, being able to think through information is a baisc assumption behind citizenship--if you are cowed by what is simply because it is, and you do not have the tools to relativize what you encounter, then you have no hope of making coherent decisions, informed choices--no hope of being able to assess what is as over against what could be, no way of weighing alternatives, thinking in terms of strategy, etc.

it is amazing to me that conservatives want to institute passivity through education when in their politics are so much about their own solitary intellectual heroism.
it makes no sense.

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it make you sick.

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mixedmedia

So this is now about not having time to teach American literature?

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

guyy

Yeah, i think there is some misunderstanding here. I'm saying that if you are what Holden called a phony, "Catcher in the rye" was/is a dangerous book because it legitimates a certain kind of dissent. Whether you call it "dissent" or "Pre-vertin' 'murican yout", the book does have a concrete social and political impact.

I think part of the problem is that we read it against different contexts. I'm thinking fifties-sixties-seventies and you seem to have something like Columbine in mind.

JumpinJesus

Banning books amounts to nothing more than a means of control. The motivation is the desire to control access to information by one group over another.

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guyy

Grammar is an after-the-fact summarisation of linguistic practice. Linguistic form structures the message, but there is still a message. To write an essay, a student has to go outside the grammar book for knowledge and opinion.

In ancient times, they had kids memorise Homer or Confucius & the other 4 books & 5 classics. "There. Do it like that." You'd pick up the proper form and the content in the process of reproduction. Anglo-American pedagogy seems to be stuck in a reaction against that sort of classicism.

JumpinJesus

I find this fascinating and would like this discussion to play a larger role in this topic than grammar and testing.

When you say you don't like the argument that books are harmless, what do you mean by that?

Do you feel that some books are harmful, and if so, how and to whom?

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Baraka_Guru

Yes. This is what I'm getting at.

Is this in reference to Plato's railing against the written word, and that it leads to forgetfulness and a lack of seriousness (i.e. the dialogue is the only serious discourse)?

It is a pity what we have lost from classical education, but I do believe it isn't practical anymore--not in our current culture and political economy.

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

guyy

Sure, they can be harmful.

Take the Confucian classics i mentioned above. The Mencius has always been a problem for conservative rulers who would otherwise be happy with Confucianism. The problem was that Mencius thought that it was OK for commoners to overthrow bad rulers. Even the word 革命, which is how "revolution" gets translated in Chinese and Japanese, has its origins in Mencian ideas. As the left-populist Confucianist, Mencius was often banned.

Any text that seemed to promote egalitarianism was obviously a threat to the feudal order, and such books were often banned. Interestingly, one of those banned under Japanese feudalism was the xtian bible. (along with Mencius, too, of course)

In general i'd like to think that books & ideas can still have an impact outside the text. Exactly what that impact is, and whom it affects, depend on the book and the times.

If you want to say that there are books that bring us to change how we live, or, books that at least try to do that, then you accept that they are political. As part of a political process, books will have friends and enemies; they will help some and hurt others, they will anger some, and embolden others.

On the other hand, saying that books are harmless really amounts to a dismissal of their power. If they are indeed harmless, they become "mere entertainment", museum pieces representing bygone ages, or school lessons.

smoore

I'm regretful I missed this earlier.

I can tell you exactly what motivates book banning:

Fear.

That one word is why every book that has been banned has ever been banned.

You can collate it out however you like but fear of the * is the root cause.

Off to read the replies.


I'm hating you so very much right now. Steinbeck is what it is.

Heh, you just redeemed yourself. So what about that, Ustwo?


Right? So disappointing. I wanted lust, horny nasty lust. You know, like my pubescent brain was thinking.


I'm not much a fan of poetry and I'm certainly not a fan of the CC system.

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smoore

Ustwo

Are you inviting me to stick it in your pooper?

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Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

smoore

I literally LOLed.

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smoore

Baraka_Guru

He wrote "what about that?" not "how about that?"

__________________
Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot