High School Language Arts = Mind Pollution?

Mind Pollution: R-Rated and Depressing Literature in High School
by Mère Fâchée

In the early 2000’s, I made the mistake of allowing one of my daughters to enroll in high school in a large district in south King County, after homeschooling her since 5th grade. Her first English teacher there, while fairly academically focused and appropriately demanding of her students, had questionable judgment when it came to choosing literature selections.

The first of several unfortunate selections was Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. When my daughter told me that was the book they were reading, I had a vague sense that I had heard something negative about that book. I told her to let me know immediately if she came across any inappropriate content. It wasn’t long before she found it. This book is Angelou’s autobiography. She is a black woman who was sexually abused as a child by her mother’s live-in lover. She is very detailed and graphic in her descriptions of the abuse – to the point of describing the look and feel of the abuser’s relevant male anatomy.

As Angelou is a talented writer, the book leaves the reader with a very vivid mental picture of what occurred. It is a picture I wish my daughter did not have in her mind, and one I wish I could erase from my own. You see, in order to confront the teacher from a point of personal knowledge, rather than hearsay, I had to read the book myself.

My daughter and I met with the teacher together. I explained to the teacher how inappropriate it was for a book of this nature to be used in any K-12 school. While college students might have the maturity to read such content, I would even question the book’s selection in a college literature class based on quality, considering the caliber of its competition for space in a crowded syllabus. Perhaps for a class in black literature, ethnic literature, or women’s literature, it would make the grade.

Words are powerful, I told her – a contention with which she agreed. I explained the vivid images evoked by the words on the page that I wish I had not had to read. I made a few other points, which the teacher conceded.
· If this book were made into a movie, it would have to be R-rated at the very least – a movie my 16-year-old daughter and her classmates would not be able to get in to see without a parent to accompany them.
· A newspaper would be prohibited from publishing certain excerpts from the book, as the content would be considered salacious.
· I would not be allowed to read these particular excerpts on either radio or television, because of broadcast decency standards.
· If I tried to read the same parts of the book publicly at a school board meeting, they would stop me.

Why, then, I asked, were 15 and 16-year-olds being asked to read this? Was it because diversity standards required them to read black authors? Then read The Three Musketeers. I am sure that many of the students would be surprised and pleased to learn that Alexander Dumas was black. Do they need a black woman who has written an autobiography of her childhood abuse? Thelma Wells has written a compelling one that manages to evoke the pain of the abuse without the graphic language.

The teacher’s response was that this selection had been approved by a district level committee. She had not actually disagreed with any of my points, but it was clear that I had not convinced her that the book was inappropriate. The best she could do for me was to say that my daughter could be excused from reading the rest of the book. But the damage had already been done. She had read the worst of it, and the remainder of the book was not nearly so graphic.

We chose to pursue the issue at the district level. My daughter wrote the letter herself, which is probably why I didn’t end up being denounced in the papers as a book-burner. The district was very complementary to my daughter for being so well spoken and willing to take action on something she felt strongly about. (In other words, they validated her feelings, without conceding any wrong-doing.) They also said that the teacher was mistaken; there is no longer a district level literature approval process. It was all on her, but there had been a change in policy, so her mistake was understandable. It was the ol’ bureaucratic run around. Nothing has changed. I am sure they are still using this book in sophomore English.

Having now been alerted to our more tender sensibilities, the teacher mentioned at conference time that the next book was Of Mice and Men, which I might find objectionable for its language. I know Steinbeck is considered one of America’s greatest novelists, but I am sure that he did not expect this one to be read in high school classrooms. The language is quite realistic, meaning a lot of ‘30’s era swearing. I had the teacher send the book home and I leafed through it. I let my daughter make the decision, but I warned her that nearly every other page had a character using the Lord’s name in vain and that she would be offended. She opted not to read it and instead read The Pearl, another Steinbeck selection, but without the swearing. Why couldn’t the entire class read The Pearl? Why should high school students be asked to read material in which the characters use language that violates the school’s conduct code? (One that is not enforced, I might add.)

Another problem with the selections for sophomore English was the relentlessly depressing tone of most of what the students read. The Angelou book was disturbing for its depiction of child sexual abuse. I have never read a Steinbeck book that wasn’t a ‘downer’ on some level. They also read a collection of short stories from around the world. I did not read these, but my daughter gave me brief overviews of the plots of several of them.

A story set in Africa is about a young girl who is captured by slave traders. Her father searches her down and rescues her. After the rescue, he takes a sharp implement and horribly disfigures her face. This is to make her undesirable to the slave traders.

A story set in Russia is about a man who is a low-level functionary. He owns a shabby coat that barely keeps him warm enough to survive the brutal winters. Everyone also always overlooks him. After years of saving up meager funds, he purchases a warm and expensive coat that will not only keep him cozy in winter, but will make others see him as a real ‘somebody’. The coat works its purpose and he gets noticed and promoted. Life goes on well for him until he is robbed of his coat. The police seem uninterested in his case and the perpetrator is never caught. He loses his job and, unable to afford another coat, dies from exposure. The man’s ghost haunts the police officer whom he blamed for his death (not the thief!?), ultimately stealing the policeman’s coat, so that the policeman meets the same ugly fate.

My daughter had this same teacher as a senior. Conference time brought another warning about language in a literature selection, A Prayer for Owen Meany. I told the teacher that, at 18, my daughter was old enough to make those decisions for herself. Nearly three years in that school had changed her significantly and she opted to read it. I leafed through it when she brought it home and saw numerous f-bombs in it. I read an online summary of it and suspect from that synopsis that the book also has a very specific political point-of-view, one quite different from my own. A comment my daughter made at that time led me to believe that she and her teacher were making unkind jokes with each other at my expense. Can you sue a school for alienation of affection? I wonder.