The Signal has an interesting article in today’s paper about the mother of a 14 year Saugus high student who’s upset about reading material the school assigned her. The material has:
“The Glass Castle” is a 2005 memoir by Jeannette Walls that chronicles Walls’ harsh childhood and family life.
The book includes profanity, criticisms of Christianity and accounts of sexual abuse and prostitution.
“I just felt that those things were not in place at school,” Riddle said.
“I think we have to remember that (students are) not adults and that we have to be very careful with what we’re assigning them. They’re still forming opinions.”
Curious, I checked this book out on Amazon to get a synopsis:
Jeannette Walls’s father always called her “Mountain Goat” and there’s perhaps no more apt nickname for a girl who navigated a sheer and towering cliff of childhood both daily and stoically. In The Glass Castle, Walls chronicles her upbringing at the hands of eccentric, nomadic parents–Rose Mary, her frustrated-artist mother, and Rex, her brilliant, alcoholic father. To call the elder Walls’s childrearing style laissez faire would be putting it mildly. As Rose Mary and Rex, motivated by whims and paranoia, uprooted their kids time and again, the youngsters (Walls, her brother and two sisters) were left largely to their own devices. But while Rex and Rose Mary firmly believed children learned best from their own mistakes, they themselves never seemed to do so, repeating the same disastrous patterns that eventually landed them on the streets. Walls describes in fascinating detail what it was to be a child in this family, from the embarrassing (wearing shoes held together with safety pins; using markers to color her skin in an effort to camouflage holes in her pants) to the horrific (being told, after a creepy uncle pleasured himself in close proximity, that sexual assault is a crime of perception; and being pimped by her father at a bar). Though Walls has well earned the right to complain, at no point does she play the victim. In fact, Walls’ removed, nonjudgmental stance is initially startling, since many of the circumstances she describes could be categorized as abusive (and unquestioningly neglectful). But on the contrary, Walls respects her parents’ knack for making hardships feel like adventures, and her love for them–despite their overwhelming self-absorption–resonates from cover to cover.
When I read the description aloud to my wife, she thought it might be a bit inappropriate for a 14 year old high school student.
But then again, she reflected, when she was a child behind the Iron Curtain she read the Greek classics with loads of gory sexual innuendo and activities. And at that age as a Catholic school boy, I was reading Huck Finn, Judy Bloom and other books that at the very least, were controversial and banned at one time or another. As far as the Bible- well King David wasn’t exactly a stand-up guy when he killed Bathsheba’s husband and took her as his wife, but we read about him too.
Maybe this Saugus High mother ought to do what one of my high school friend’s mothers did. I was good friends with an LDS kid named Ben. Ben and I loved Tom Clancy-type techno-thrillers. One summer, we swapped books; I gave him a book by Larry Bond and he gave me a similar book about an F-14 fighter pilot. I began reading the book that night and found it odd that no less than five words had been blacked out in the first chapter. Paging through the book, I found hundreds of blacked out words, sentences, even wholesale paragraphs. What’s more, I found an entire chapter had been torn from the book.
It turns out Ben’s mother had pre-censored the book before she allowed her son to read it. She blacked out all the curse words, sexual innuendo, and more. That missing chapter? It was five page chapter describing the sex scene between the protagonist and his lady friend. Oddly enough the mom didn’t black out or censor any of the violence in the book; she only felt her son should be protected from sex and bad words.
When I asked Ben about this he didn’t think it was a big deal. Needless to say I didn’t get books from him anymore, and I worried what his mom would think about me if she learned I had given Ben a book that wasn’t censored.
I’m not sure what I’ll do in situations like this when/if I become a parent. I’d like to think I’d take the time to study the material with my kid and help them understand it and learn from it rather than pressure the school district to censor it.
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