Political Comics, Memes, Jokes, etc.

[Dill]

(11-04-2023, 05:46 PM)pally Wrote: The people attempting to stop the teaching of "To Kill a Mockingbird" used the same language as the Florida banners.  The people doing the pushback also used the same language. There is one big difference though, in the TKAM case verses the Florida laws, they only wanted to stop the mandated teaching of the book.  They didn't want it removed from the classroom or library.  They wanted to replace TKAM with something more representative of modern times.  If they want to do the same thing for Moby Dick, I'm all for it!  That has to be the most boring book ever.

NO!! Not with you there. I think maybe you had a boring teacher.

Anyway, one reason for reading books of times past, which force us to expand our vocabularies, expose us to complex narrative strategies, and look into lives lived generations ago, is to expand our understanding of our own culture and past. 

There used to be quite a fuss over Huck Finn. I wonder how that's going now. Is it possible to teach that at all in HS now? 

Some interesting questions raised by censorship about classics and class power--I get that--but I'm also worried that something else is
lost when books have to conform to contemporary tastes. Those tastes may seem universal or simply normal, when really they are just 
contemporary. I'm thankful that I was forced to read things in high school and college that I'd never have picked on my own, because I didn't
know what I needed to know.  I'm for books which "speak" to this or that group's experience, but the goal of literary/historical education should not be just
to mirror this or that group's experiences for that group. That limits and contracts understanding rather than expanding it.