Posted on 06/29/2004 10:55:24 PM PDT by kattracks
Have you checked your child's summer reading list? Beware: Some lame-brained school officials have decided to ditch the sonnets of Shakespeare for the tripe of Tupac.
That's slain gangsta rapper Tupac Shakur -- the drug-dealing, baseball bat-wielding, cop-hating, Black Panthers-worshiping, convicted sexual abuser who made a fortune extolling the "thug life" before he was gunned down in Las Vegas eight years ago.Teachers in Worcester, Mass., have embraced Shakur's posthumously published book of poems as a way to get middle school students' attention. "We wanted to include books that kids would want to read," Michael O'Sullivan, a member of the summer reading list selection committee, explained to the Telegram and Gazette of Worcester last month before school let out. ''Reading counterculture in schools, and to get kids to read anything that is not completely objectionable, is the goal,'' Deputy Superintendent Stephen E. Mills echoed.
Frances Arena, manager of curriculum and professional development of the Worcester Public Schools, told me this week that Shakur's book will remain on the list for the foreseeable future because it "heightens awareness of character education" and, more importantly, because it's "popular with the kids."
If that's the standard, why not just drop the pretense of academic instruction and assign them comic books and romance novels?
A school board member in Palm Beach County, Fla., is also championing Shakur's so-called literary work. Debra Robinson lobbied to bring Shakur's book into the classroom last month because "I always think we need to capture the children's attention where they are and bring them to where they need to be."
The presumption that children -- and particularly inner-city children -- can only be stimulated by the contemporary and familiar smacks of lazy elitism and latent racism. These educators, and I use that term as loosely as gangster rappers wear their pants, are clearly more interested in appearing cool than in inculcating a refined literary sense in students. Their aim is not enlightenment but dumbed-down ghetto entertainment. So that teachers and pupils can "relate" and be "down with that." So they can "keep it real." You know what I'm sayin'?
The schoolhouse rap peddlers disingenuously argue that Shakur's puerile scribblings serve as useful tools to engage children in reading. Reading? Deciphering is more like it. Shakur's volume, ''The Rose That Grew From Concrete," looks more like a collection of cell phone text messages, teenage hieroglyphics and Backstreet Boys album titles than a collection of poems.
One poem is "Dedicated 2 Me." Another is "Dedicated 2 My Heart." There's one "4 Nelson Mandela" and another "2 Marilyn Monroe," which laments: "They could never understand what u set out 2 do instead they chose 2 ridicule u." Another Shakur opus is titled "When Ure Hero Falls." Still another muses: "What Is It That I (insert pictograph of an eyeball) Search 4."
A dictionary, perhaps?
In riveting prose that presumably rivals Frost or Longfellow, Shakur brags that he is "more than u can handle" and "hotter than the wax from a candle." Edgar Allan Poe had Annabel Lee. Shakur had Renee ("u were the one 2 reach into my heart"), April ("I want 2 c u"), Elizabeth ("the seas of our friendship R calm"), Michelle ("u and I have perfect hearts"), Carmen ("I wanted u more than I wanted me"), Marquita ("u were pure woman 2 me"), Irene ("I knew from the First glance that u would be hard 2 4get"), and Jada.
Proclaiming his love "4 Jada," Shakur pays gallant literary tribute to the object of his desire: "u bring me 2 climax without sex."
Lord Byron, he wasn't.
In an introduction to the dead rapper's volume, Shakur's manager, Leila Steinberg, suggests that her hero has been unjustly denied his "place as a literary artist/poet" because of the "media's sometimes negative portrayal" of him. May I politely suggest that he has been denied a place among the world's greatest poets because his writing is no better than a four-letter word that rhymes with "rap"?
The Western literary canon has been flushed down the cultural toilet in favor of shallow ramblings by celebrity thugs whose thoughts are best left on bathroom walls.
As 2Pac might have responded: 3 Cheers 4 Diversity.
Michelle Malkin is a syndicated columnist and maintains her weblog at michellemalkin.com
©2004 Creators Syndicate, Inc.
LOL!
The first thing I thought of was Langston Hughes. We had some of his poetry held up as a shining example of social commentary, especially 'A Dream Deferred', throughout my government school education. (Which I've since recovered from...) Yesterday on the radio I heard some info about Hughes, how he was a full on commie atheist. Didn't surprise me a bit.
Now that was a great movie!
Michelle knows how to get directly to the heart of the matter! She is my favorite cultural columnist.
I like the "old school" kind of resources. ;o)
My daughter (she'll be a junior in HS this year) has classics on her reading list: The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dracula, Frankenstein, and if I recall correctly, Native Son (yes there are black-penned books that I consider classics). None of this Six-pack or 40 Ounce business, or whatever the heck his name was...
Just damn.
If you want on the list, FReepmail me. This IS a high-volume PING list...
Members of the Fairfax County, VA, school board should get up in front of everyone and read excerpts from some of these fine books:
http://63.220.28.231/booksag.htm
According to a group called “Parents Against Bad Books In Schools” (PABBIS), in Fairfax County VA, EVERY McLean HS rising 11th and 12th grade English class requires the reading of “ Ragtime” by E. L. Doctorow. PABBIS reports the book has a woman being dog whipped and whipped with a razor strap during sex; oral sex; and a scene, too graphic to describe here, of what happens when a man spies on a naked woman being massaged by another woman.
At Mount Vernon HS all International Baccalaureate (IB) 11th grade English students are required to read One Hundred Years of Solitude. Again according to PABBIS, the two main themes of One Hundred Years of Solitude, a rambling dreamlike book from the so-called "magical realism" genre, are solitude and incest. One review said this book "has a lot of violence, much incestuous sex, and plenty of anti-capitalism and anti-clericism." Another said there is "enough incest to keep those with even the shortest attention spans turning pages." Raping your sister, sex with another sister, sex with your aunt, a "zoological brothel" where dog gives stud services to be fed, a child with a "raw back" whose grandmother makes her service 70 men a night for 20 cents each, a male prostitute with a huge sexual organ, balancing beer on his "inconceivable maleness," are all part of this required reading for these teens who are too young to see an R-rated movie.
In the AP Literature class at Hayfield HS the theme of this summer reading list is supposedly all "cultures." Books on the list are divided into various "cultures." According to PABBIS, there are many "culture" categories but glaringly no category for majority American culture unless if one counts the category of "The Effects of British, French, and American Imperialism" or the category for "American Popular Culture and the Vietnam War" or the category of "The American Dream in Reverse."
PABBIS does a lot of research. If you don’t have time to preview personally every book on your child’s summer reading list, take a look at www.pabbis.com.
It's for the kids, you know. /sarcasm
And then school officials wonder why they have so many students sexually assaulting one another in their schools LOL. Not exactly a Great Books curriculum is it?
No The Good, The Beautiful and The True 4 U, kiddies!
Errrrr, yuck! What age group are we talking about here? I myself probably wouldn't read any of these, and I'm 40-something.
*shivers*
When I was a kid, back in the dark ages, we didn't have a summer reading list, except what we chose ourselves. We had to read a fair number of books during the school year.
Here is the PABBIS site. It covers K-12:
http://www.pabbis.com/
One is led to suspect that Muslim children get a better education in the typical madrassah school than is provided to some of our inner-city students. There is certainly no more indoctrination going on.
More dumbing-down of kids who already are living in a Third-World environment.
We homeschool, so we choose what books we use. What I would like to know from Freepers with middle schoolers or high schoolers in government schools is, are books like this commonly required reading? Are they in most libraries? What do you do?
Hokt on Eboniks B workn 4 me
OH MY! Those story lines are hideous! My son is currently going into 8th grade, but by golly I'll be keeping an eye on his assignments. Thanks for the link to PABBIS, never heard of them.
Tupac is caput.
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