Mother seeks ban on reading assignment

News Out Of Maine on the ‘Catcher in Rye’. The mother of a freshman at Noble High School in North Berwick wants J. D. Salinger’s ”The Catcher in the Rye” removed from the freshman curriculum.

She says she had never heard of Salinger’s book, a coming-of-age story about a 16-year-old boy, before she learned it was on her son’s freshman reading list.
After researching the book online with her husband, Minnon concluded it espouses immoral ideas, inappropriate for freshmen-aged students. She is asking that it be removed from the freshman curriculum in School Administrative District 60, which includes Noble High.

The Column from Foster’s Online says “When we ban a book, we commit murder. it can be a short and perilous step between what one person understands to be communication and the banning of books. In fact, the latter is commonly the antithesis of the former.“

December 10, 2004 by Uncategorized 2

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2 Responses

  1. mdoneil says:
    December 11, 2004 at 3:29 am

    In other news…
    School and public librarians have petitioned to have parents who have not heard of Catcher in the Rye or who think J.D. and Pierre Salinger are the same person banned from area schools.

    A spokesperson for the librarians who, after remarking about the intolerable salaries they pay people with graduate degrees to listen to this type of nonsense, stated that they would be pleased to offer parents access to the collection so that they may experience the classics of literature. However many parents failed to grasp that they were actually being offered books and they simply stood at the empty video shelves wondering if this Salinger fellow was perhaps the little robot in Star Wars.

    Reply
  2. VALIS says:
    December 11, 2004 at 7:04 am

    Would it be too much to ask
    for people to at least read a book themselves before deciding that they want it banned, rather than ‘researching it online’?

    Reply

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