Not to be outdone by California when it comes to freaking out about books, a Texas school district has yanked several award-winning (Pulitzer Prize winners among them) books from its approved reading list for high schoolers because they are gross, icky and altogether offensive.
Sorry, John Green, maybe you should stop writing about kids having sex you disgusting monster pedophile. And your memoir of hard times, Jeanette Walls? The one that literally made me cry even though I have only an acid-burned Barbie head in the place where my heart should be? Well, you’re gone, too. Kids just aren’t ready to read about real things that happen to real people.
Parents in Dallas, Texas apparently went off the rails recently when their precious snowflakes were assigned books by Walls and Green and demanded that these horrifying works be pulled off the shelf along with works by Sherman Alexie and Toni Morrison. They also demanded that a book about America’s working poor also be removed. Why? Because it might be considered anti-capitalist. Man, parents are aways complaining about schools not teaching their kids anything and then they get angry because there are gay characters in books. Whose fault is it now?
Jeanette Walls, who was actually scheduled to speak at a Dallas high school’s literary fair, is very upset about the fact that her book has been deemed inappropriate. In fact, she told the Dallas Morning News that she’s heartbroken.
“What I worry is that in order to protect [students], we may be taking away the tools they need to protect themselves later on,” Walls said.
Some parents have requested that the school district stick to the classics, but I remember reading the classics in high school. Wasn’t Romeo and Juliet just about some horny teens who made stupid decisions? And if I remember correctly, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was full of swearing. Wait, what? There’s been a campaign against Mark Twain, too? Maybe we should just not let kids read anything. Maybe we should just stop teaching them to read and write until they’re adults. Seriously, have you read John Green? The only thing less offensive than his work is Goodnight, Moon and that book is pretty upsetting because who the fuck even eats mush anymore? I’d be more worried about strange old ladies in my room than the sex I’d read about in Green’s flowery prose. Let’s wait and watch for these students to protest.
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