I like being politically correct. There are limits though. The new version of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn which is being republished for schools has removed the "n - word" replacing it w/ "slave". The reasoning is that the book has been banned from schools in the past because of the language. To me, banning books from school is never the answer. Instead, teach students to read stories in the framework of the time and place when they were written. Sanitizing great literature is presumptuous at best, inane at worst. What next? The Merchant of Venice's character, Shylock, is no longer a Jew? Remove all of the scatology references from Gulliver's Travels? Rewrite Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter so Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale live happily ever after? (Oh, yes, Hollywood already did that. What a dud that movie was!)
Wednesday, January 05, 2011
D - Moon
I like being politically correct. There are limits though. The new version of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn which is being republished for schools has removed the "n - word" replacing it w/ "slave". The reasoning is that the book has been banned from schools in the past because of the language. To me, banning books from school is never the answer. Instead, teach students to read stories in the framework of the time and place when they were written. Sanitizing great literature is presumptuous at best, inane at worst. What next? The Merchant of Venice's character, Shylock, is no longer a Jew? Remove all of the scatology references from Gulliver's Travels? Rewrite Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter so Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale live happily ever after? (Oh, yes, Hollywood already did that. What a dud that movie was!)
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2 comments:
In 1888, Twain wrote: "the difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter."
If Twain could choose, if we were offended by his work, that we either didn't read it, or that we change it, which one would you suppose he would choose?
DB
Watching The View right now and Whoopi Goldberg completely agrees with your point of view. If you take these words out, how will future generations learn our history and understand how far we've come?
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