According to the American Library Association (ALA), “Banned Books Week is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read […] it highlights the value of free and open access to information […] even [that which] some consider unorthodox or unpopular.” In the true spirit of the week, the English department unanimously decided to enhance their students’ education by trying to teaching more of these hotly contested works.
Upon further investigation, teachers were frankly not at all surprised that there was no more room to add more controversial material. “Don’t get me wrong,” said one teacher, “I have nothing against banned books. In fact, quite the contrary.” A simple Google search for ‘banned books’ yields comprehensive lists bearing a remarkable resemblance to the school’s English curriculum. In fact, the ALA included an English 12 favorite, Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, in their “Top 10 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2014” list, banned for “offensive language, unsuited to [an] age group” nearly old enough to vote.
To no one’s alarm, some Midwestern PTO moms with nothing better to do decided the following books, among others, were far too offensive to the virgin eyes of their children to even exist within a 5-mile radius of the school:
- Night
- Hamlet
- Catch-22
- Jane Eyre
- Into the Wild
- Animal Farm
- Fahrenheit 451
- Lord Of The Flies
- Brave New World
- The Scarlet Letter
- The Great Gatsby
- Heart of Darkness
- Catcher In The Rye
- To Kill A Mockingbird
- Their Eyes Were Watching God
- One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- Speak
In the end, every effort to slip even a single excerpt into the curriculum proved futile. Those short lived openings were too often filled with conflagrant text from “Banned Books That Shaped America” title Moby Dick. Teachers across the board were surprised at the controversiality of anti-communist novel Animal Farm, famously promoted by the CIA. Reasons cited included, “Orwell was a communist.”
In fact, it seems that even the History department has joined in on this orgy porgy of controversial literature, teaching novels such as The Jungle, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Call Of The Wild. AP U.S. History itself even seems to be unable to resist the contagion of rebellion, including Grapes of Wrath and Gone With The Wind in its curriculum.
As last week wound to a close, WA English teachers put the whole ordeal behind them, confident that there is no curriculum out there quite as infuriating to the simple minded as their own.
