"There will be no book burning" - Boson School Committee Votes To Recycle Five Controversial Novels - 29 April 2020
By David Livinov
(Burning of Jewish Holy Books by Saint Louis IX A Catholic Saint and King of France)
A Boson school board removed five famous — but allegedly "controversial" — books from district classrooms, inadvertently renewing 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 Boson School
District may use for instruction.
The
mayoraly appointed school board voted 5-2 on Wednesday to yank the works out of teachers'
hands starting this fall. The removed books contain content that could
potentially harm students, school board Vice President Jim Hart told NBC
News on Tuesday.
"If I were to read these
in a corporate environment, in an office environment, I would be dragged
into the Personnel Department, or Equal Opportunity office," to face an equal opportunity complaint proceeding, Hart said. "The
question is why this is acceptable in one environment and not another." He added, "these students need to be ready for a real world work environment, not an endless questioning of why things are the way they are or a detached outsider's boring writings about how bored he is by people with money."
"Caged
Bird" was derided for "depicting black people as helpless victims who drank and used drugs," "Gatsby" and "Things"
are loaded with "sexual references," "Invisible Man" has bad language
and "Catch-22" includes violence, according to the school district.
Dianne
K. Shibe, president of the Boson Education Association teachers union,
said parents and her members were stunned by the board action.
Even
though the school board had listed an agenda item to discuss
"controversial book descriptions," Shibe said, no one believed those
works were under serious threat.
"Most of
the community didn't respond, because these books had been used
forever," Shibe told NBC News. "Now in retrospect, it's like, 'duh.' I
could have seen this coming."
Shibe said her union would push board members to reconsider their action.
"This
is not set in stone," she said. "The union is all about educating
students, and this flies in the face of educating students."
Mary Ann Cockle, owner of Fireside Books in Boson, about a mile from district headquarters, said her store ran out of copies of the books within hours of the board's action.
"People
who had read the books years ago are buying them to read again and to
give away," Cockle said Tuesday. "Our biggest outpouring of support are
people buying the books and donating them or leaving them to us to
distribute for free."
A new shipment of
"Caged" and "Invisible Man" arrived at Fireside on Tuesday, and Cockle
expects them all to be gone by Wednesday.
"I don't think they realized they were treading on censorship, and people are completely opposed to censorship," she said.
Hart insisted that the books are not "banned" and said they all remain in district libraries.
Even
though students are still free to read the books on their own, Hart
said, it would be unfair to ask teachers to have to navigate their
pupils through the complicated subject matter.
"These are teachers, not counselors," Hart said. "While I haven't read 'The Great Gatsby' since high school I did watch the movie on streaming. The narrator ends up in an insane asylum. Is this the role model we want to hold up to our students. The 'good guy' ends up in a nut house because upper class people are so evil. Is that America?"
Several books that were not removed from classrooms also came under harsh scrutiny.
"The
Jungle" and "A Christmas Carol" could be interpreted as advocating for
socialism, while "A Street in Bronzeville" was called into question for
showing too much "realism" in describing racism against African
Americans, according to a district memo.
"Let me emphasize, we will never burn books. They will be sent out to a paper mill to be recycled."
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