'Hurtful' Harper Lee and Mark Twain dropped from Minnesota curriculum

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

'Hurtful' Harper Lee and Mark Twain dropped from Minnesota curriculum

To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn to be dropped from Duluth area classes because of ‘uncomfortable atmosphere’ their use of racial slurs creates

Alison Flood
Mon 12 Feb 2018 10.33 GMT Last modified on Mon 12 Feb 2018 10.35 GMT

A school district in Minnesota has pulled To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from its curriculum, arguing that the classic novels’ use of racial slurs risked students being “humiliated or marginalised”.

The Duluth school district will keep the titles in its libraries, but from the next school year, they will be replaced on the curriculum for ninth and 11th-grade English classes, according to local newspaper the Bemidji Pioneer.

Duluth’s director of curriculum and instruction Michael Cary told the Pioneer that his department wanted to be considerate of all its students, and that there were other literary options that “teach the same lessons” as To Kill a Mockingbird and Huckleberry Finn without containing racial slurs. The N-word is used frequently in both titles – more than 200 times in Mark Twain’s 19th-century novel – but both are widely considered anti-racist texts.

“We felt that we could still teach the same standards and expectations through other novels that didn’t require students to feel humiliated or marginalised by the use of racial slurs,” said Carey.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/feb/12/hurtful-harper-lee-mark-twain-dropped-from-minnesota-curriculum-to-kill-a-mockingbird-duluth