Meeting the Kids

Lately I've been seeing a lot of people talking about a Tennessee school board banning Art Spiegelman's Maus and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. As usual, the headlines make you think there are bonfires and goosestepping school officials chucking books into the flames. But then you read the article and it turns out the books are just being removed from the curricula due to depictions of nudity and incest. It's interesting people who are normally concerned about triggery content don't seem to be raising concerns about these things.

I certainly don't think these books should be banned. I'd absolutely make them available in the school library for students who are ready for the material. But speaking as someone who teaches eighth graders, the idea of making them required reading in a classroom strikes me as cruel. There may be a few students ready for this material but for most of them it's going to feel like punishment. I would argue the symbolism in Maus is probably too sophisticated for kids to whom you might need to explain that, no, Tom from Tom and Jerry is not a Nazi. And Toni Morrison I could see for senior year of high school, maybe, but overall I'd think she's college material, which is where I read her. And that's probably why young teachers are using her works--they'd just read her in college and lack the imagination to find books someone could appreciate from an eighth grader's perspective.

Why not teach Alice in Wonderland? Or Treasure Island? Why not make these kids excited about literature before hitting them with the hard stuff? More than anything, I feel there is a need to nurture a love for the medium rather than a need to expose kids to works designed as wrecking balls for concepts they're barely acquainted with and which probably seem irrelevant to them.

This isn't to say I don't think kids should be exposed to uncomfortable historical topics. One of the English books I teach from here in Japan has a chapter on Martin Luther King Jr. without any explanation of the history of race relations or slavery in the U.S. Japanese junior high school students naturally don't study U.S. history any more than U.S. junior high school students study Japanese history. So, when I've gotten to that chapter in the book, I've spent an entire class period giving them a lecture on the history of race relations and slavery in the Americas. But I don't do it using irony or complex symbolism. It's a straight forward lecture and that's what's appropriate for eighth graders whose reading level is currently Demon Slayer/Kimetsu no Yaiba.