Posted on 02/20/2006 5:01:05 PM PST by wagglebee
(AgapePress) - A school district in Maine has reaffirmed its reinstatement of a sexually explicit book several parents want removed from the local high school's curriculum. The Orono School Committee recently voted to retain the controversial novel Girl Interrupted in the ninth grade English literature class at Orono High School.
Girl Interrupted, a novel written by Susanna Kaysen, was affirmed for use in the high school curriculum over the objections of parents and local residents who take exception to the profuse profanity and sexual content in the book. Michael Heath, head of the Christian Civic League of Maine (CCLM), says this graphic work of fiction has no place in schools where impressionable young people will be exposed to it.
"It's a book about an 18-year-old," Heath explains, "who ends up in a mental asylum and has a number of conversations with mentally disturbed people -- conversations of the most graphic sort, especially sexual. The f-word [appears] 30 times in one page, and this is being given to freshmen in high school as literature. It's absolutely horrifying."
School board members argue that using Girl Interrupted in the classroom honors free speech and that prohibiting it would amount to unconstitutional censorship. However, the CCLM spokesman feels the board members are making a spurious claim when they cite First Amendment freedom as a justification for obscenity.
The Civic League's representative at the board's meeting contested that idea from the floor, Heath points out. "When one of the school board members said to not have the book in the curriculum would be the practice of censorship," he notes, "our representative objected and said, 'Look, you censor Playboy. You don't allow people to read Playboy in the schools, so that's a non-issue. You're lying.'"
The Orono school board has the responsibility to make decisions about content and does in fact make such decisions all the time, Heath contends. He feels parents and pro-family citizens in the Maine community have every right to be outraged over the school committee's decision to retain a sexually explicit novel in Orono High School's ninth-grade English literature classes.
I have read the book. My curiosity is quenched. For those who brought up the movie, I can only say they have most likely not read the book and watched the movie to compare. The differnces were too numerous to point out, not so many that I suspected that the movie was not based on the book at all, just enough to make it a completely different animal, in terms of discussing it. But then again I don't want the public school showing kids that movie either.
I can’t say that it turned out to really be worthwhile. Knowing ahead of time that it is about a girl who goes to an insane asylum (back in the 1960s) does not prepare you for reading this book. It is written by an insane person and you just have to read it in order to really get that. [I should probably make a distinction here between the author's problems and other mental problems that many of us are familiar with, like depression. Some of us may be very understanding of various problems and able to cope with people who have them, etc. But this author is not just struggling with depression or whatever other things your average neighbor has without being hospitalized, she is a total lunatic who would mostly likely still be institutionalized today, if her symptoms were still as bad as they were then and maybe ought to be.] Her writing skills are pathetic. There are many problems with her writing that were very distracting and difficult to wade through. Somewhere after the halfway point either my brain magically adjusted and began to follow more easily OR the later chapters were written when the insane author was having some better days (lesser symptoms/more meds?). I suppose the publisher (and apparently some academics) think that they are very avant-garde, celebrating her unique writing style. I don’t blame them. Some pretty good stuff has been written by loons and druggies in the past. Maybe I would have published it too. After all, just how does a publisher discover the next Coleridge? Well, no, I probably wouldn’t have and I don’t really believe that there is much chance that this book is going to stand the test of time.
From what some Freepers had said, I thought I might find some good at the end of the book such as a “moral of the story”, maybe something that would cause me to assign it to my own child if he were already involved in drugs and/or promiscuity and needed me to take a tough love approach to parenting. But that is just not there. It isn’t in it at all. The author is insane and most of what is in the book comes off as being the result of her insanity, not the result of moral or immoral decision making. The book is not laid out in a chronological pattern, (which might have added a little strength to the possibility of anyone seeing a cause and effect pattern) and does not follow any other kind of coherent pattern. It may have been designed to show how disorganized the thinking of the author was in the time period that she was writing about, but I tend to lean more towards thinking she was just insane and it shows in her writing.
Reading the book, I could see how someone who had an interest in, or experience with mental problems might find it interesting. If one of my children wanted to read it anytime soon, I would make them wait until they were older, maybe old enough to leave home. Having always enjoyed biographies, I found some enjoyment in at least a few small parts of the book. The best parts were places where the insanity of the author or of her fellow asylum patients resulted in views or actions that correlated pretty well with liberal thinking and/or some of the ridiculous things in our society today. That was pretty amusing. But for a reader with a completely different world view, I’m sure those passages would come off in a completely different way. For example, they watched coverage of the Vietnam War and anti-war protester on TV. It is clear that they did not really understand much about what was going on, but they identified with the immature and the anti-social behaviors of the protesters, such as sticking their tongues out at policemen and taking over Universities from authority figures, and they hoped that the protesters would eventually get around to liberating them from the asylum, so they yelled, “Right on!” at the TV.
It does have content in some parts of the book that I found offensive. I am not going to copy any of the passages here for you. Funny how that didn’t register with me when you mentioned it before. Think about it. If I think these things are bad it follows logically that I think they are things that I should not be exposing myself and others to. Yes, if there is bad language (or sexual content or unnecessarily explicit description of sex or whatever) in the book and it is known to me ahead of time because someone else read it and made it known to me that is what they found objectionable in the book then I already know that I also am going to find the book objectionable. If I consider the source to be questionable I might check for myself, of course, but I am under no obligation to check every trashy book that some academic is in love with for myself in order to be allowed to have an opinion such as agreeing that such things are not the things that I want the public school to be pushing on teenagers. I grew up in modern America the same as most of you probably did (and I went to public schools) and I have been surrounded by coarse, profane and vulgar language and jokes since my early days, but not at home, thank goodness. There is nothing wrong with recognizing this for what it is and objecting to it in spite of living in a society where many people including plenty of political conservatives accept it with out a thought for what the Bible says about it or any other thing that might be a part of how it came to have so many labels that inherently show that it is negative. I enjoy Free Republic and would object to not being able to follow the discussion with out coming across offensive quotes from the book, so I won’t type out examples of nasty stuff from the book. I’ll just say the people in the asylum use crude vocabulary and treat sexual subjects in an insane manner, go figure--insane people talking in insane ways.
I would guess that plenty of adults would agree that the offensive parts of the book are similar to the things we have to deal with anyway when dealing with gross people out in public. It isn't something to celebrate or even to except as ok. It just is. And it is perhaps a lot more often in public schools than anywhere else in the country. I don't know exactly all the reasons why our public schools have become such thriving centers of exhibition of the worst of social interaction, but at least I can take comfort in knowing that my daughter's aren't in them and if possible my son won't be for much longer. For parents who are having to choose the public schools, but are smart enought to object to the agenda that says we should try to influence kids to be completely excepting of every sort of behavior, I would suppose they will keep on objecting to teachers picking the wrong books and assigning them to the students to make sure they are reading this material.
Catcher is a fine novel with all sorts of religious symbolism. The key is that Holden is not supposed to be all that admirable of a character. Too many teachers take the easy way out and talk about how 'cool' he is.
If you want to see the working definition of 'range' compare him in Steetcar to his Marc Antony in Julius Caesar a couple of years later.
Do you have kids yet?
You don't have to be "old,needlebutt geezer" to think that exposing kids to this trash just might be a bad idea.
Teenagers, even well brought up ones, can be susceptible to some very insidious ideas that are purveyed in pop culture. Teenaged girls especially have a tendency to over-dramatize things, in imitation of the trashy acting they see in movies and TV show.
And that's just the least problematic thing about movies like this...what's worse is that they romanticize "mental illness" and suicide, drug use, and sickeningly debased sex. This can lead to tragic consequences.
Sorry, can't agree. Caulfield is irritating and inconsistent, whether he's supposed to be an anti-hero or not. If you want an anti-hero, try Ishmael.
Wow, in the ninth grade? Where did you go to school?
I didn't read Anna Karenina until I was well into my 20s. And it certainly was never required reading anywhere I went to school!
But I agree, "it's a great novel, with a serious moral point of view, revealing what the consequences of adultery are."
I do not have kids yet but I would not mind my daughters reading this book. There would be lots of discussion to go along with it. It's teachable moment and I'm not into censoring books.
Heh. Well, I'd like to see you get back to us on that about 15 years after you have a daughter.
That is a darned good book. (But not something I'd want my ninth-grader to read.)
My mother let me read whatever I wanted and I read far in advance of my age. I have no qualms about letting my children reading this book or anything like it. You do whatever you want and I'll do whatever I want. Thank you.
Episcopalian prep school, back before they turned squishy liberal.
We never read War and Peace--probably too long--but I read it over the course of a summer a few years later.
I'm trying to remember some of the things we read in school. Moby Dick, Anna Karenina, The Waste Land, Hamlet, Lear, Othello, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Bear, and plenty of good poetry. I read some Dostoevsky back then but I don't remember if it was assigned or voluntary.
I read Go Ask Alice in gradeschool and that was required reading from the nuns. People think kids are such delicate little flowers that just the mere mention of sex, they'll go crazy. Reading about sex didn't make me want to have any.
I think the word is 'Europhallogocentric'.
BS. One at least two different occasions I obtained alternate novels for my kids when I thought the assignments were inappropriate.
And I've corrected teachers' hand outs and even some textbooks.
Those who say parents can't get involved aren't and don't know what they're talking about.
Even in a very Liberal area, it can be done.
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