[A. Pole]

It's not necessarily liberal, but I will always remember it as THE book that I was forced to read so many times throughout school. It was assigned four or five times between 6th grade and the end of high school! Talk about overkill.

Such things make me think that this book is fake. P.C. crowd has an allergy to the truth, they could not promote authentic stuff repeatedly.

[Media Insurgent]

I've never considered the possibility that the book was a fake. It wouldn't shock me, but I've never seen any evidence presented to either prove or disprove its authenticity.

In fairness to my teachers, the ones that betrayed any ideology at all were certainly liberal, but this was in the early 80s-the days before political correctness. For the most part they tolerated, and even encouraged dissenting viewpoints.(College was another story!)

I think the main reason that the book got assigned so much was laziness on my teachers' part. It's a book that introduces some very important historical themes but is written on the level of an adolescent. That makes it an obvious choice for anyone who wants to teach kids a little history or talk about the "man's inhumanity to man" theme or even just a story about growing up. The problem is that it's too obvious a choice. It was always the first book that they thought of along those lines and they assigned it without considering that all of their peers in earlier grades had already done so.