Friday, February 24, 2006

California School District Bans 23 Books

My God, this reads like an Onion article!

School district trustees in Lake Los Angeles have removed 23 books from a list of 68 that were to placed on library shelves. In other words, they voted to remove a third of the books!

And what are these horribly offending books? No GLBT titles, but only because I'm sure there weren't any on the master list. But these books raised the trustees' ire: three bilingual Clifford the Big Red Dog books, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (of course!), and two books from the Artemis Fowl series.
Trustee Marlene Olivarez, a teacher who retired from the district two years ago, said the latest "Harry Potter" installment was rejected because it is fantasy.

"We want books to be things that children would be able to relate to in real life," she said.
Yes, let's reject ALL books that might be different from real life--as in, every genre book ever written! Then we can be absolutely sure that kids will never read for pleasure again! How is it possible that this woman was once a teacher?

Why do I feel like I'm living in Rome right before everything collapsed, and they started using the Forum to graze sheep?

3 Comments:

Blogger Lisa Yee said...

Unbelieveable. Oh wait! If it's unbelieveable, then maybe no one can relate to my comment.

5:08 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Why do I have the sinking feeling that the reason they banned the bilingual Clifford books is they couldn't be sure what the Spanish actually said?

10:07 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

well, this is on the outskirts of Los Angeles, a few miles into the desert.

Lots of heatstroke up there.

11:03 AM  

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