Libri interruptus update: School district retreats

posted at 6:15 pm on December 10, 2008 by Ed Morrissey
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On Monday, I wrote about a New Rochelle school that assigned Girl, Interrupted as required reading and then crudely censored the book by ripping out pages after receiving a few complaints about objectionable material.  Now the New Rochelle Board of Education has decided to replace the books on the shelves with intact copies, which should make the publisher happy.  Robert Cox has the update:

In response to our Exclusive Report on Monday, the New Rochelle Board of Education announced today that it would immediately replace all 50 copies of Susanna Kaysen’s memoir Girl, Interrupted which were distributed to students at New Rochelle High School two weeks ago and undertake a review of district policy and practices regarding book selection. No mention was made of the district’s “book challenge” policy which is at the heart of the Girl, Interrupted controversy. …

The move was widely criticized. Both the National Coalition Against Censorship and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression expressed their alarm at the actions of the school district. The story was a hot topic across the blogosphere, transcending political ideology. It was featured on the left-leaning Boing Boing, the most widely read blog in the world, as well as the top conservative site, Hot Air which is owned by Michelle Malkin of Fox News. The New Yorker magazine also picked up the story as well as dozens of blog sites focused on literary and free speech issues.

The board made the right call, but still misunderstands the issue:

In a separate statement, Schools Superintendent Richard Organisciak sought to minimize the significance of “minor” changes to the book and the impact of the school teaching from what he called “slightly expurgated version” of the novel.

“The original decision to excise the pages was made at the building level,” said Richard Organisciak. The decision “would not have been reviewed either by the central administration or by the Board of Education.”

Minor?  Slightly expurgated?  That’s not what happened to these books.  They were permanently damaged, not “expurgated”.  Organisciak also didn’t explain why the normal book-challenge policy wasn’t followed, which requires a public hearing.  The superintendent tried making the argument that some books are not appropriate for all ages, which no one argued at all.

The problem wasn’t so much the original assignment as it was the preparation of the class and the reaction to criticism.  The school acted as though the passages on pages 64-70, which discussed sexual activity, came as some sort of surprise when a few parents complained.  Did the teachers not read the book they assigned to the students?  Did the school not have any sort of review process?  And if they did and approved the course plan, why did they suddenly embrace bowdlerization after getting those complaints rather than explain their methodology?

Perhaps Girl, Interrupted is a fine piece of modern literature; I’ve never read it, so I can’t make that call.  However, the schools in New Rochelle have plenty of other options in teaching literature to their students, including Dickens, Shakespeare, Voltaire, Dumas, among many others.  If the school finds the subject matter in the chapter “Checkmate” so objectionable, perhaps they should rely on the classics instead, which to my knowledge never discussed squeezing oral sex in between five-minute bed checks.  If they think Susan Kaysen’s book is important enough to include in a lesson plan, then they should have been prepared to defend it better than they did.

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