Raging Red

Today’s serendipitously appropriate Cat and Girl comic

Okay, that’s not really what she said. However, that would indeed be the end result of one local parent’s ludicrous notion that a school’s zero-tolerance policy for violence should not just apply to actual people in the real world, but should be extended to characters in the novels high school students read in English class. Her particular objection is to Pat Conroy’s novel Beach Music. At a school board meeting last night, the parent who objects to the novel did what all parents who object to books do — she read selected passages of the book, which contained descriptions of child rape, suicide, and killing.

This woman’s brilliant logic is:

Zero tolerance for violence should mean just that. When the school condones it, that’s telling the kids a lot.

Why she thinks the school is condoning child rape, suicide, or killing by allowing high school students to read books that contain those subjects is beyond me. I haven’t read any Pat Conroy novels, but I do know that many of his books deal with child abuse — physical, sexual, emotional — and family violence and that they’re based on his own childhood growing up with an abusive, alcoholic father. I’m going to take a wild guess that Pat Conroy doesn’t condone child rape or think that suicide is a neat idea. I’m going to take another wild guess that Beach Music does the exact opposite of condoning those things by telling a story that illustrates how harmful and painful those things are.

I do have to laugh at what the end result of her proposed policy would be — no Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, or really any Shakespeare (at least not the tragedies). Let’s see, what else would be out? To Kill a Mockingbird (yikes! it has “kill” right there in the title!), The Grapes of Wrath, Catch-22, Things Fall Apart. Hell, probably most (if not all) of the novels that people generally consider to be the best of all time would have to be banned.

And why stop with English class? Shouldn’t this zero-tolerance policy apply to the books students read in all of their classes? I guess schools will have to start teaching history without mentioning any wars, the founding of the United States, slavery, the Holocaust. Better not tell them about the deaths of Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy — wouldn’t want to condone assassination.

How far should we extend this logic? Do the characters in novels have to comply with ALL of the school’s policies? Can they smoke? Chew gum? Talk on their cell phones? Do they have to meet the dress code?

The extent to which some parents want to limit their children’s education is sad to me.