My rather secular Catholic home was essentially the same in its approach to reading and books. My mother and grandmother were proud of me if they discovered me reading something ‘too adult’ for my age. I don’t remember reading anything especially racy, but I do recall an incident in the second grade. The students took turns bringing a book from home to read to the class on Fridays. My turn came up in early December, and I brought in my copy of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which I had just received and devoured the previous week. I remember Mr. Brucker taking me aside to tell me I could read it to him some afternoon. I also remember reading The Red Badge of Courage and A Tale of Two Cities in the sixth grade. The former I finished and understood, but the latter I just slogged through because I didn’t want to admit defeat, and really understood very little. In the eighth grade I somehow got hooked on Herman Wouk and read The Winds of War and its sequel War and Remembrance. I suppose someone would tell me that these books were inappropriate for a boy my age, but, to paraphrase Susan, I nonetheless grew up to be a law abiding adult who votes in elections and sleeps with my own spouse—and only my own spouse. Go figure.
In my years teaching high school English I endured several book challenges. I witnessed a couple of challenges at our middle school to Nightjohn and The Bridge to Terabithia, among others. The Bridge to Terabithia, as you can guess, was objected to because of the elements of magic. Nightjohn was objected to because some parents were sick of having their children being forced to read about slavery. They felt that the students were being made to feel guilty for something they were not responsible for. Never mind that such thinking would rule out reading history of any kind.
At the high school I was at the center of a challenge to Romeo and Juliet and at the periphery of a challenge to Ragtime. The parents who challenged Romeo and Juliet objected to the sex, of course. Why is it so often the sex and not the violence? No one seems to care much that Tybalt kills Mercutio or that Romeo kills Tybalt, or that the lovers commit suicide, for that matter, but all the sexual innuendo in Mercutio’s and the Nurse’s lines get some parents up in arms. The objection to Ragtime was also over sex, and this case was especially odd because the text was being read by seniors in a section of UConn English—17 and 18 year-old students taking a college course in a high school—but one boy’s mother got upset about the scene in which Mother’s Younger Brother is hiding in an armoire and watching Emma Goldman undress Evelyn Nesbit. We had a principal who, despite being a former English teacher, was afraid to get into a confrontation with the parent and so was ready to accede to her demand to remove the book from the curriculum. It took having the whole English department faculty confront him to get him to back off from this position. At the time, I had never read the book, but I was so upset on principle that the principal was going to allow the ban that I went home that night and read the whole book, and then wrote a concise defense of the book and that scene, in particular. My colleagues in the department voted to have my statement read aloud by the principal at a board meeting, which he reluctantly agreed to do. But once the mother of the boy heard somehow that the members of the English department were unified in their opposition, she no-showed the board meeting and the challenge was tabled.
Lately my wife and I have been reading Roald Dahl books to my six-year-old son at night before bed. We read The Fantastic Mr. Fox last week, and are about halfway through Danny, the Champion of the World this week. He’s loving them. We have already read a couple of Harry Potter books, as well as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The War of the Worlds (he’s into science and monsters and such). So far, no apparent detrimental affects on his character or morals.
Last week he had a funny incident at school. He’s in first grade, and his school is listed as a failing school, so there are all sorts of intervention programs to try to bring up the CMT scores. One agenda they have is Reading is Fundamental. Basically, some people from RIF come to the school once a month, and each child gets to choose a free book. My son loves this program, but he keeps picking third grade books, and the RIF folks keep telling him that he has to choose a first grade book. I suppose they must have a limited number and that they bring books at grade level according to the numbers reported to them by the school. So, last time, my son refused to take a book because the first grade selections were ‘baby books.’ I told him next time to offer to read a third grade book to the person to prove it’s at his ability level. Meanwhile, I’m left wondering why so may adults expend so much energy trying to tell kids what they can’t read.
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