Hot take: 'To Kill a Mockingbird' hit different after I saw my town ban it

I signed up to read 'To Kill a Mockingbird' to my kid's 5th grade class last fall. Our school board banned it from the curriculum 3 years ago but I figured a parent read-aloud was fine. The principal pulled me aside 10 minutes in and said I had to stop because of a new district policy. I learned the real reason was a single parent complaint about the word 'n-word' in chapter 9, not the whole story about justice. Has anyone else run into a book getting quietly pulled from classrooms even when it's not on the official banned list?

2 comments

2 Comments

ross.sean7d ago

Doesn't it feel like more and more we're deciding what kids can handle before they even get a chance to try? I've seen it with movies and music too, people picking apart one bad word and forgetting the whole point of the story. We're so worried about protecting them from a single tough topic that we miss the chance to actually teach them something real.

emma_mitchell7d ago

Agree with @ross.sean, we're bubble-wrapping kids instead of teaching them.