Bob Cox writes, From the St. Petersburg (Flordia) Times,
"The Judy Blume novel Deenie will remain in Hernando County elementary schools, despite recommendations from a review committee and the superintendent to remove it.
But to get the 31-year-old book, students will have to bring a note from home.
“I can’t see denying its availability if some parents decide it’s okay for their child to read,” School Board vice chairman Jim Malcolm said. “Some people are offended by the content. Others aren’t. I will defer to individual parent choice for their child.”
Morons!
As usual, these government officious have it exactly backwards. In a free country, children do not require permission slips from their parent to have access to a book; they require denial of permission slips from their parents to advise the school they are forbidden to have access to a work.
What is bad about this is that principal John DiRienzo seems to have very stupidly tried to please everybody. The work was subjected to a review process that decided the elementary school was not an appropriate milieu, and it almost certainly is not since Blume’s target audience for that work is adolescents. Mind you, girls do mature faster than boys and are usually pubescent by 11 or so.
And aside from those two issues, children read things which attract their interest. I hardly think second and third graders are going to read this particular book any more than they would read Catcher in the Rye simply because the issues it deals with are over their heads.
Re:Morons!
A question for you: why is it “stupid” to try to please the people whom you are hired to serve? You seem to want the school officials to say that they know what’s good for kids regardless of what parents think… well, that’s not right. Parents always should have the biggest say in their child’s education. School officials’ salaries are paid by parents, as they are the local taxpayers. Ignoring what they want is like me telling my boss I won’t do what she asks because I disagree. It’s not how things should work.
I do see some potential problems with the permission slip system… parents who may otherwise have let their kids read this book may be alarmed by having to sign a permission slip. They may assume the book must have some really mature content in it (which it doesn’t) in order to require permission, and decide that their child should not read it. However, I do think that the school officials were right to try to please as many parents as possible, and this may have been the only way to accomplish that.
Re:Morons!
Hi, April.
Perhaps that is the problem; that he was trying to please people instead of trying to serve them. At any rate, you can’t please everybody; that’s a lesson that Aesop passed along five to six hundred years before Christ.
The principal unilaterally violated the mission of the review process and he doesn’t seem to have really made any effort to please anybody to my way of thinking. There was no mention that he had tried to reach a negotiated settlement between the complainants and those opposed to removing the book.