Litchfield teacher resigns amid short story controversy

On June 18, the School Board of Campbell High School in Litchfield, New Hampshire decided to remove four short stories from the “Love/Gender/Family” unit of an English class.  Early last week, Kathleen Reilly resigned from her position as English department head, citing a desire to teach elementary school in a different district.

Reilly, who had taught at the high school since it opened in 2000, did not teach the junior/senior “Short Stories” class herself, but did choose its curriculum.  She did not explicitly state that the controversy forced her to resign.  However, the principal’s suggestion that she had made a “mistake in judgment” when choosing the stories, coupled with the School Board’s decision to impose more oversight on curriculum development in the future, likely influenced Reilly’s decision to leave.

A Brief History of Film Censorship

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Video games are ruining our children! A look at an amicus brief supporting CA violent video game law

Spilling a little red type.  GamePolitics does quick work on an amicus brief filed by the Eagle Forum (“leading the pro-family movement since 1972″) supporting California’s video game law by highlighting the most problematic claims of the brief. As GamePolitics writes, “In the amicus brief, the Eagle Forum lays an array of societal problems at the feet of violent video games: bad grades, violent behavior, poor graduation rates, school shootings, game addiction and even sudden death.” As we’ve noted: these correlations are shaky at best.

Facebook Reveals the Corporate Face of the Associated Press

The media never looked more corporate.  After reprimanding a reporter for posting a comment critical of the company’s investment decisions, the Associated Press has come out with a new policy governing the use of social networking sites.  Among the AP’s requirements for all employees, not just reporters, is:

Posting material about the AP’s internal operations is prohibited on employees’ personal pages, and employees also should avoid including political affiliations in their profiles and steer clear of making any postings that express political views or take stands on contentious issues. Employees should be mindful that any personal information they disclose about themselves or colleagues may be linked to the AP’s name. That’s true even if staffers restrict their pages to viewing only by friends.

It’s true that the Associated Press and other news service agencies have a legitimate interest in maintaining reputations for unbiased, truthful reporting.  This is the commodity that they trade.

Nude Sculpture Removed from Public View in Michigan

This week, “Walking Man,” a sculpture of a nude man, was removed from the public space in front of the Anton Art Center in mount Clemens, MI, because of individual complaints. That city officials should respond to the complaints of a few vocal community members by removing an art work from a public space is a disturbing violation of both the artist’s free speech rights and the rights of the public to have access to a wide variety of artistic expression. The personal prejudices of a small minority, who think that representations of human body are shameful, have now been illegitimately imposed on the whole community. Are Mount Clemens officials aware that the Constitution bars them from pandering to the special interest groups and imposing their taste and moral beliefs on the public?

Walking Man by Carl Goines

Sculptures of nudes, which grace public buildings and city squares around the world, mean different things to different people: to some they signify the beauty and dignity of the human body, the visible externalization of spirit, to others they remind of the sins of the flesh. The latter persistently try to remove any representation of nudes from public view claiming they are offended or that (against all evidence) children would be harmed by seeing a nude. Each person has a right to hold and express their beliefs, of course, but not the right to force those beliefs on a diverse contemporary public by dictating what public art is appropriate and what is not.

Board of Ed v. Pico: 27 years of reading freely in school libraries

If you love libraries, you might know that today marks the anniversary of an important decision upholding the First Amendment in schools.

In Board of  Ed. v. Pico (1982), the plurality opinion stated that school libraries have “special characteristics” as providers of free access to information, and should be especially vigilant of upholding students’ First Amendment rights.  Pico began when the Island Trees School District on Long Island banned a number of books, including Go Ask Alice, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and Richard Wright’s Black Boy, from its libraries, calling them “anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain filthy.”  The Supreme Court ultimately found that for a school library to “prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion” is a violation of students’ First Amendment Rights.

Summer reading list controversies: removal of all LGBTQ books in DC, Sherman Alexie’s book challenged

It’s only the second day of summer, and controversial books are already disappearing from summer reading lists.

A quiet act of censorship by Washington, D.C. Public Schools may have resulted in a reading list free of LGBTQ titles. According to a post on ALA’s LGBTQ listerve by Jeanne Lauber, librarian in the D.C. Public Libraries, the school district asked the Public Library for a list of LGBTQ books in order to remove them from reading assignments. The library complied without knowing why they had been asked.

Interview with Brent Hartinger, author of challenged book, Geography Club

Kids’ Right To Read’s Jaime Chosak interviewed Brent Hartinger, author of the young adult novel Geography Club.  Parents recently asked for the removal of the book from shelves in the West Bend Public Library in Wisconsin.

Kids Right to Read Project: What was your motivation for writing Geography Club?

Brent Hartinger: You know, it’s partly because the story is semi-autobiographical – I was a gay teen – and I figured if I told this story, it might make things a little bit easier for the gay teens who come after me.

Report Card: STUDENT PRESS

GRADE: B+

This extracurricular activity remains one of the most difficult offered at school these days – anyone who has ever worked on a student paper will vouch for the work that goes into investigating and getting the scoop, the late nights editing articles, and the ethical debates over striking the balance between objectivity and thoughtfulness for the school community.  Then, of course, there is the hanging threat that the hand of the school administration censor will fall on the hard-earned copy like a guillotine.

Since the Supreme Court upheld the ability of a school principal to exercise oversight of a student newspaper in the landmark student speech decision, Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier, achieving a model free press in the public schools is like reading the Sunday edition of the New York Times perched on scaffolding serenaded by jackhammers at a construction site.  That is to say, it is not impossible.

Hemingway, King, Sedaris kicked out of New Hampshire high school classes

A couple of recent censorship attempts at public libraries have been squashed, but yesterday a group of parents succeeded in banning four short stories from high school classrooms in Litchfield, New Hampshire.   School Superintendent Elaine F. Cutler stated that stories by authors including Stephen King, David Sedaris, and Ernest Hemingway will be removed from the “Love/Gender/Family” unit of a senior English class at Campbell High School.

At a school board meeting on Wednesday, about 25 “irate” parents demanded the stories’ immediate removal. The objections, first raised by parent Sue Ann Johnson, center around themes of cannibalism, homosexuality, drug use, rape, murder, and abortion in the stories.  King’s “Survivor Type,” Sedaris’ “I Like Guys*,” Laura Lippman’s “The Crack Cocaine Diet,” and Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” are the stories now banned.