Missouri State Professor Gets Slaughterhouse-Five Banned In Local Schools.

Ah. There’d been a good amount of time since I heard the tale of some uppity dickbag or dickbagette who went and got a perfectly outstanding book banned from a school district. Perhaps it’s my liberal Northeastern upbringing, but I’m surprised this book was the latest casualty.

Slaughterhouse-Five? So it goes.

Boing Boing:

Wesley Scroggins, a business school professor at Missouri State University, wrote an editorial for Gannett’s News-Leader condemning the teaching of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five in Republic, MO curriculum. He said that the Vonnegut novel (considered one of the best novels of the twentieth century and widely taught in schools across the English-speaking world) contained too much cussing for children. He also condemned Sarah Ockler’s Twenty Boy Summer, a book about a girl who experiments with sex during summer holidays because it contained sex.

In response, the Republic school board has banned Slaughterhouse-Five and Twenty Boy Summer, removing them from both its classrooms and school libraries. Scroggins is disappointed that they didn’t ban another book, Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak.

Super-bummed. Hopefully the intrepid curious ones will pick up the scent of something interesting going on here. Realizing there may be something afoot regarding the banning. Wanting to see what all the hoopla is about. Then pick up a Kurty V classic and get good and mindfucked. Perhaps even ones who never would have paid attention if it had  be taught.

To dream.