An Alaska school board removed five famous -- but allegedly "controversial" -- books from district classrooms, inadvertently spurring renewed local interest in the excluded works.
Alaska school board pulls 'Great Gatsby' from curriculum for 'controversial' content
"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou, "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller, "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien, "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison were all taken off an approved list of works that teachers in the Mat-Su Borough School District may use for instruction.
The school board voted 5-2 on Wednesday to yank those works out of teachers' hands starting this fall. The removed books contained content that could potentially harm students, school board vice president Jim Hart told NBC News on Tuesday.
"Even though students are still free to read these books on their own, Hart said it'd be unfair to ask teachers to have to navigate their pupils through the complicated subject matter."
One has to hope that with these books off the curriculum, students'll have more time to read "Art of the Deal" by some unknown ghost writer....
Alaska school board pulls 'Great Gatsby' from curriculum for 'controversial' content
"I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou, "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller, "The Things They Carried" by Tim O'Brien, "The Great Gatsby" by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison were all taken off an approved list of works that teachers in the Mat-Su Borough School District may use for instruction.
The school board voted 5-2 on Wednesday to yank those works out of teachers' hands starting this fall. The removed books contained content that could potentially harm students, school board vice president Jim Hart told NBC News on Tuesday.
"Even though students are still free to read these books on their own, Hart said it'd be unfair to ask teachers to have to navigate their pupils through the complicated subject matter."
One has to hope that with these books off the curriculum, students'll have more time to read "Art of the Deal" by some unknown ghost writer....