Sweeds and Indians. American indians, Comanchie I hope. They fight, hard.

i am guessing Yarworth spends a lot of time "inspecting" the locker room showers, and enforcing hygene standards.

For people like Yarworth, the penumbras only emanate in the direction which happens to be exactly aligned with his personal prejudices.

i'm surprised they bothered with the vault. whatever happened to the good old public book burning?

then again, those evangelicals, repressed as they are, can be a little sneaky about stuff...

certainly a burning would be more fun.

What escapes the Dr. Yarworths of this world is how many kids with their acts together are highly embarassed by this kind of stuff and resent being introduced to it by adults they trust. He thinks he is Mr. Liberty, but he is actually Mr. Imposer.

One would think that the relevant question is whether, given a 9 month school year and a practically infinite list of potential reading material, is this book really deserving of a place in the curriculum?

OJ: You're not just talking about the book, are you?

Yes, unless he's a witch too.

i'm not familiar with _the buffalo tree_, so i can't speak for the book as a whole, but it certainly seems reactionary to remove it from sight based on a single passage that may be offensive to certain readers.

i suspect it does in fact have greater resonance with kids today than does, say _emma bovary_ or anything by d.h.lawrence.

what's wrong with letting kids critique it and call it worthless trash in the book report if that's how they feel about it?

given what kids can see today just by turning on the tv, opening a magazine, or diving down the street and checking out the latest hooters billboard, i'd say miss hunsicker is just a tad uncomfortable with her own emerging sexuality.

lonbud:

Obviously we should censor the obscenity in the public media too, but the idea that parents shouldn't decide what their children are exposed to, that the state should decide for them, is unAmerican.

oj:
if more parents got involved with their kids' education we'd be far better off than we are, but for the most part they aren't. *somebody* has to make up the reading list; i don't think there's anything wrong with entrusting that task to the local teachers.

and, uh, censorship is unAmerican, dude.

Yes, that's the difference between Left and Right--you think teachers should do it and we think parents should.

when have we ever not censored?

imagine how much room there would be on the library shelves, if leftists ever took over this country ?

lonbud;

Hmmm, picking books based on whether they "resonate" with today's youth. That's awfully parochial, don't you think? Shouldn't the goal to be to broaden their horizons by exposing them to quality literature that has withstood the test of time, instead of pandering with epiphenominal confections of current fashion?

I doubt that there was public debate about adding this book to the curriculum. And branding efforts to remove it as 'reactionary' seem a tad hyperbolic. How about portraying these students and parents as merely wanting the school board to justify why this book should be required reading? If they cannot do so to the community's satisfaction, then it has no business being taught. And that is NOT censorship, unless the 1st Amendment contains a clause unfamiliar to me stating that an author has the right to have his book included on high-school reading lists.

Charlton Heston did something similar about a decade ago at a Time-Warner board meeting, when he asked the CEO to read the lyrics of the song "Cop Killer" out loud, and then explain why the company should continue to do business with Interscope Records.

The bad publicity forced Time-Warner to drop Interscope, but the company quickly found another distributor, and while Time-Warner has sold off its record division, I'm sure you could check the catlog from a few years ago and find songs that were just as distasteful, but not as publicized. So the school board can ban the book from Muhlenberg High School, but unless parents stay alert, there are certainly people within the school system out there who would love to get books just as explicit as "The Buffalo Tree" back into the reading curriculum.

My question is what is an 11th grade class (16 & 17 year-olds) doing reading a "young adult novel" (which are aimed at age 13 readers)? Shouldn't they be working on something a bit more challenging? I find that offensive.

you folks are so hung up on labels -leftist, rightist- and on demonizing anyone or anything remotely *liberal* about our society, it's no wonder the body politic is paralysed.

clue: the root of the word liberal is the same as the one for liberty; it's from the latin word for free, which has the same root as freedom. isn't that what our sons and daughters are dying for out there in the desert?

you don't read too well, either.

oj wrote: we should censor the public media, too. to which i responded that censorship is unAmerican.

also, i never said teachers ought to trump parents in directing children's education.

i'm in favor of parents and kids being actively involved -i'd homeschool mine if i could afford to; as it is i send him to a co-op, where the parents are required to work in the classroom at least one day a week. but the sad reality is the vast majority of parents in this country are not -for a whole host of complex reasons too deep to go into here- involved in their kids' educations.

by all means, have a strong PTA and require teachers and the school board to justify their teaching methods and tools.

but don't ban a book just because some 16 year old girl is uncomfortable with her panties getting wet while she's doing her homework.

old guy: i understand exactly what you said, but if you used the words pandering, epiphenomenal, and confection in conversation with a randomly chosen collection of 16 year olds you'd be met with a collective blank stare. think of it this way: if you want your kids to appreciate the blues and jazz, you better turn 'em on to rock & roll first.

john: my guess is you are one of those guys who denigrates "liberals" as people who think profit is a dirty word. and yet, you have no qualms about taking a company like time-warner to task for making a profit through its interscope subsidiary when doing so offends your sense of moral propriety. in the field of logic that's called a fallacy.

lonbud:

Again, when have we ever not censored public media?

oj:
oh, you mean *regulate* the media? i thought you free market types were against the intrusion of the state and the waste and inefficiency of big government.

No, I meant what I said: censor. We censor in addition to regulate and we always have. nothing could be more American--it's a Puritan Nation.

Perhaps this'll help you:

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/20157/

ionbud: the banning, in this instance, would be at the parents' behest, not the child's. she merely brought it to their attention.

there is quite a lot of classical liberalism here, but its not uniformly distributed :)

what did you think of mc cain's antics last week ?

oj is in love with the guy, and was bragging about getting his poster signed :)

The 'state', like evil corporations, are people. And teachers are parents, and parents teachers.

Removing a book from the curriculum is in no way, shape, or form the same thing as 'banning' it.

oj:

you seem to identify with americans like joseph mccarthy, roy cohn, and the uptight scolds of the hayes code era.

puritans may have been predominate among the elites who first came to this continent from europe, but america is by no means now, nor has it ever been a puritan nation.

america was founded and organized under, among others, a document called the constitution of the united states. perhaps you are familiar with it?

its salient provision, in this particular case, is something called the 1st amendment, which, in part, prohibits the enactment of laws abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.

the article you referrd me to on alternet is far more in tune with my perspective in this debate than it is with yours; thanks for that.

cjm:

to which of mccain's antics do you refer?

b:

let's not get too hung up on semantics. i was just using "banned" in the same context it was used in the article:

"Less than an hour later, by a unanimous vote of the board (two of its nine members were absent) "The Buffalo Tree" was banned, officially excised from the Muhlenberg High School curriculum."

cjm:

technically it wasn't the parents who removed the book from the curriculum, it was the school board, on a vote taken in response to miss hunsicker's protestations.

his grand compromise with the other 13 dwarves

its salient provision, in this particular case, is something called the 1st amendment, which, in part, prohibits the enactment of laws abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.

No, it really doesn't.

david:

what do you mean, "no it really doesn't."?

cjm:

re: the grand compromise -it's theater of the absurd. yet another red-herring play designed to make the people take their eyes off the ball.

I mean that, both as written and as interpreted, the First Amendment allows for the passage of laws abridging the freedom of speech. As written, the First Amendment assigns to the states (i.e., not Congress) the power to abridge the freedom of speech. As interpreted, either the states or Congress may abridge the freedom of speech if necessary to achieve a compelling need, like stopping people from expressing their political preferences.

lonbud:

No, McCarthy and Cohn were gay, they should have been persecuted too.

joe mc carthy was gay ? i believe you, of course, but is there a url you can provide so i can read about it ? guess that's why they called him "Tail gunner" Joe

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAmccarthy.htm

lonbud:

You'll have noted that the article describes censorship in the public media?

‘Buffalo Tree’ is a minor symptom of the disease. That is why my grandchildren are home schooled. Our family decided that we would not trust our children to the influence of people that we do not know and if we did know them would in many instances find their values objectionable.

thanks for the info...odd that his sexual proclivities aren't mentioned more widely. especially as republican sexual pecadillos are like blood in the water for the msm. did ann coulter cover this in her book on joe m. ?