Well-said.

And it is strange.

But my, wasn’t that a wonderful read?

Have you checked out Nabokov’s Pnin? A little novella about a weird little emigre Russian professor of Russian language adrift in America. Laugh-out-loud funny, heartwarming, quirky goodness.

As someone who comes from that kind of background, I am always a little shocked when confronted with the kind of narrow-minded people who will try to keep books like this out of the curriculum despite the fact that it is, in my opinion, one of the best novels of the 20th century.

The hypocrisy is ridiculous when teenagers, many of whom are having sex, are prevented from reading/experiencing media that is remotely related to sex in the curriculum. Additionally, parents that cry out against them are still the same ones that let their 14-year-old play hours of GTA:IV and watch highly sexualized commercials, movies, and TV shows.

These kind of parents lack trust in their children and in their children’s teachers. It’s a strange situation.

Just goes to show, doesn’t it, that the “danger” is not that students can handle it – both our experiences suggest they can (though the student feedback made me consider offering an alternate for those who don’t feel they can handle differing viewpoints or mature content – bye-bye Shakespeare?).

So it seems we fear not immature students, doesn’t it? It’s the immature parents we fear. So weird.

And whether “faith” is strengthened or weakened by encounters with the world? That’s the student’s personal road – that’s education. Both results are growth somehow.

It does remind me of when I taught The Chocolate War to a group of 9th graders in the UK (at an international school). One of the final assignments was to make a persuasive presentation to a group of peers about the same issue: should this book be required reading, or should it be banned? Like your students, many of mine were puzzled that others viewed the book as so dangerous and immoral. Others suggested perhaps it should be a choice rather than required, but not one of them suggested it should be banned — not even the sweet, conservative Muslim girl who told me at the start of the unit that she was feeling uncomfortable reading some of the more graphic sections. Even she was able to recognize that there was value in reading such a text — even though it tore right through all that she felt personally and morally opposed to. If nothing else, it probably strengthened her faith rather than destroyed it.