Six wonderful books banned by Christian influenced school boards and the reasons why.

Here is the list courtesy of Mad Mikes America:

1. The Invisible Man.

Reason: Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is a masterpiece that captures the grim realities of racial discrimination in 20th-century America. Unfortunately, thanks to a ban passed by the local board of education, school kids in Randolph County, N.C, won’t be able find that novel in their library. An angry parent objected to the book’s sexual content and lack of innocence, and the school board agreed to ban the book by a vote of 5-2 with one of the board members, Gary Mason, a scholarly man no doubt, stated: “I didn’t find any literary value.”

Such a great book! I read it when I was young and have recommended to to kids for years. Morons!

2. The entire Tarzan series.

Reason: Edgar Rice Burroughs’ classic series about a man living in the jungle was pulled from the shelves of a public library in the appropriately named town of Tarzana, Calif. Authorities thought the adventure stories unsuitable for youngsters, since there was no evidence that Tarzan and Jane had married before they started cohabiting in the treetops. Ralph Rothmund, who ran Burroughs’ estate, protested that the couple had taken marital vows in the jungle with Jane’s father serving as minister. “The father may not have been an ordained minister,” said Rothmund, “but after all things were primitive in those days in the jungle.”

Yes we can't have children emulating this kind of behavior by running off to the wilds of Africa, meeting a young woman, and cohabiting in the treetops with her, now can we?

By the way the Tarzan books were my favorites as a kid and I read all of them, and watched every one of the movies, religiously.

I could even do a rather impressive impression of the Tarzan yell. Used the scare the crap out of the neighborhood dogs.  (Well it was either the yell or the fact I was standing in my backyard in my underwear with a butter knife slipped into the waistband. True story.)

3. Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl.

Reason: The book has been challenged numerous times for sexually explicit passages, and, in 1983, the Alabama State Textbook Committee called for rejecting the book because it was “a real downer.”

Yes what a downer. I mean it certainly had no redeeming value as a lesson on prejudice, or adolescence, or human suffering, or anything like that right?

To be serious it is a book that EVERYBODY should read once in their life. Or perhaps more than once

4. Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare

Reason: School authorities in Merrimack, N.H. found nothing amusing about Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, in which a girl washes ashore after a shipwreck, disguises herself as a page, and falls in love with her male master. That jolly cross-dressing and fake-same-sex romance was deemed in violation of the district’s “prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction,” and copies of the play were pulled from schools

Cross-dressing, and faux gay sex stuff must be stopped don'tcha know.

After all nothing says you are receiving a well rounded education quite like raging homophobia, and a fear of literary classic, right?

5. Charlotte’s Web

Reason: A parents group in Kansas decided that any book featuring two talking animals must be the work of the devil, and so had E.B. White’s 1952 work barred from classrooms. The group’s central complaint was that humans are the highest level of God’s creation, as shown by, they said, the fact we’re “the only creatures that can communicate vocally. Showing lower life forms with human abilities is sacrilegious and disrespectful to God.”

WTF? Charlotte's Web?  And since when are animals talking "sacrilegious and disrespectful to God?"

Haven't these idiots ever watched a Disney film?

Scratch that, they probably haven't stepped foot in the "Devil's Cinema" in years.

6. The Harry Potter series

Reason: While pretty much every child was devouring the final book in the Harry Potter series in 2007, one school was pulling all seven Potter books from its library shelves. The pastor of St. Joseph School in Wakefield, Mass., deemed their sorcery-heavy story-lines inappropriate for a Catholic school. Parents said the pastor thought most children were “strong enough to resist the temptation,” but his job was to “protect the weak and the strong.” 

Yeah well this one was a gimme wasn't it? After all Christians have been freaking out about this series since the very first one hit the bookstores.  And do you remember that trio of young exorcists who were going to England to battle the forces of Harry Potter?

Of course these are wonderful books as well, and they have been worth their weight in gold considering how they encouraged so many youngsters to step away from their televisions and start reading again.

So those are the books that certain religious types want to keep out of the hands of students.

And yet the book that these people would endorse without question, and would insist that EVERY student read from cover to cover, is the Bible.

You remember the Bible right?  It is the book that has great moral stories like this one:

Source

Yeah but of course it doesn't contain any sorcery, talking animals, or sex right?

Wait....

US teachers spend the most time in the classroom teaching. So much for the idea that American teachers are lazy.

Courtesy of the Wall Street Journal:

Among 27 member nations tracked by the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development ), U.S. primary-school educators spent 1,097 hours a year teaching despite only spending 36 weeks a year in the classroom — among the lowest among the countries tracked. That was more than 100 hours more than New Zealand, in second place at 985 hours, despite students in that country going to school for 39 weeks. 

The OECD average is 786 hours. And that’s just the time teachers spend on instruction. Including hours teachers spend on work at home and outside the classroom, American primary-school educators spend 1,913 working in a year. According to data from the comparable year in a Labor Department survey, an average full-time employee works 1,932 hours a year spread out over 48 weeks (excluding two weeks vacation and federal holidays).

One of the things that can piss me off faster than just about anything else in the world is listening to people slam teachers. That absolutely makes my blood boil.

I have had the privilege of working with some of the finest educators in the country, and I can tell you from my own experiences with schools in the Anchorage area, that I have only rarely, and I mean RARELY, come across a teacher who I considered less than completely dedicated to the children they taught.

When I worked at the local elementary school for those four years, I would often receive calls from the teacher that I worked with, who was still at the school sometimes as late as seven o-clock in the evening inputting data on the computer or preparing her lessons.

Now this article goes on to say that despite these many hours of classroom instruction that America is still not doing as well as it could with educating our young people. But I would suggest that it has much more to do with the lack of parental involvement, the "dumbing" down of the textbooks around the country,  and the focus on "teaching to the test" that has been the focus of education in our public schools since the introduction of NCLB.

Nor does it help to provide a multifaceted educational experience with the dramatic increase in the banning of books from our school libraries:

On Monday at the Republic, MO school board meeting, four Republic School Board members reviewed a year-old complaint that three books are inappropriate reading material for high school children. In a 4-0 vote, the members decided to ax two of the three books from the high school curriculum and the library shelves: Twenty Boy Summer by Sarah Ockler and Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson was spared. The resident who filed the original complaint targeted these three books because “they teach principles contrary to the Bible“ 

There have been 20 books banned in the last six months from school libraries. And instead of responding to complaints from a single parent, like in times past, these days the complaints are coming from organizations that seem determined to "clean up" the libraries in response to a religious or political agenda:

Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, says he believes the challenges are increasingly influenced by politics and the economy. 

" Districts are dependent on budgets, and politically motivated school boards try to determine what we read, what we think and what we teach," he says. 

Here is the list of banned books.

Cutting school funding at every opportunity, demanding high exam scores even in low income/high crime  areas, and removing intellectually stimulating reading material that does not comport with a right wing political agenda, and we want to blame TEACHERS for the lack of success in our classrooms?

Luisiana proudly proclaims itself to be a bastion of intellectual...no wait...I was wrong... they are burning books instead.

About 30 people gathered for a regional revival Friday night that included a book burning as a statement to reach out to local residents.

"It is allowed for Harry Potter to be taught in our schools, but not the Bible," International House of Prayer pastor James Crawford said during the Shreveport Regional Unity of Faith Revival.

That is one reason pastors from several denominations and races ripped pages from "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone." Those and pages from a pornographic magazine were put into a burn pit and set afire as praises bellowed from the congregation.

"As I tore the pages, I felt a generational curse of immorality and perversion breaking off my family," Adriane Banks said. "I felt it."

What you felt was not the perversion and immorality breaking off, it was your brain cells dying.

This fear of Harry Potter is absolutely amazing in this the new millennium. It is almost as if these people are fighting to stay as dumbed down as possible.

"Hey kids, don't read! That will just make you smart and intelligence is the work of the devil!"

Fear and superstition prompts removal of Harry Potter books from Catholic school library.

The summer reading feats of Lynne Bimmler's sixth-grade class are proudly chronicled on the St. Joseph's School website.

"The sixth grade reads an average of 7.5 books each with many students in double digits," says a note on the class page. "Of course, Harry Potter was a popular choice."

But last month, students found that their favorite series had "disapparated" from the school library, after St. Joseph's pastor, the Rev. Ron Barker, removed the books, declaring that the themes of witchcraft and sorcery were inappropriate for a Catholic school.

"He said that he thought most children were strong enough to resist the temptation," said one mother who asked that her name not be used because she did not want her family to be singled out. "But he said it's his job to protect the weak and the strong."

It seems that no matter how far humans progress from the superstitious cave dwellers that saw spirits in trees and ghosts revealed in the morning mists, we still cannot seem to let go of a primitive belief that fears magic or philosophies which challenge their chosen belief systems.

These books have fired up children's imaginations and made reading fun again. That is the sort of "magic" that should be in any school library.

Crazy Florida mom calls school library books "sinful" and wants them banned.

Laura Lopez said she will start a church-to-church petition and reach out to a Christian law center to represent her.

"To me, it doesn't end here. This is just the beginning," said the West Palm Beach mom.

Two school committees and Superintendent Art Johnson had already shot down her request. On Wednesday, the board voted unanimously to back Johnson.

I just love it when crazy Christian people demand that schools pull books that do not support their particular superstitions!

And which books does she want banned? Almost all of them.

Among the objectionable books were: Medical Ethics: Moral and Legal Conflicts in Health Care, Coping When a Parent is Gay and The Cider House Rules, a John Irving novel about a rural doctor who runs an orphanage and performs illegal abortions.

"They're teaching kids the Big Bang. They're teaching kids lies," she told the board. "The world was created 6,000 years ago. In my son's elementary school book, it says the world was created several million years ago."

So apparently this mother is protesting that her son's school is teaching him those "facts".

"How dare you teach my son that my primitive belief system is not supported by any actual facts. You are just confusing his mind and making it harder to bend to my will. Bastards!"