Having read Candy Gourlay's latest post and Scott Westerfield's whom Candy cites, I thought I'd chip into the debate over the Newbery Award winning novel The Higher Power of Lucky, a book I have not read, but after all this fuss, am very likely to read.
So what's all the fuss about?
The word scrotum which apparently appears on page 1 of the novel. The book starts with a girl over-hearing a conversation about a dog being bitten on the scrotum, by a snake, I hasten to add.
This immediately got me thinking about Mark Haddon's fantastic award winning novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time which starts with a story of a dead dog and which includes the F word on the first page. Similarly, this book caused much controversy when it first appeared.
I loved the book and when I was head of department, I really wanted to buy in copies of and teach it, but I was aware of some parents' potential objections to the F word on the first page. I know schools do teach it but given the school I was in, which was fee paying, I thought it best not to. That's a decision I made, but it didn't stop me recommending the book to receptive students (with a quiet warning about potentially offensive language).
As a teacher you have to be conscious of your role.
Saying that, I think some people who aren't, and in some cases who are, in touch with kids think children live in cocoons where innocence is best preserved. It's an idealistic view that is quaint and honourable but, I think, unrealistic.
I teach and I know what kids are like. From a teacher's perspective this is not a modern phenomenon.
Anyone who's read any Shakepeare knows how crude he can be. He had to be - to appeal to certain sects of his audience. As for Chaucer, have any of you read his tales? Sex- they're full of sex. What about D.H Lawrence's works? Oscar Wilde's stuff? Come on. Literature is full of controversy because art imitates life.
Teaching Shakespeare with words like bosom and ass (as found in my most recent Midsummer Night's Dream endeavours with Year 7 (eleven year old girls and boys)is great. The kids love it. If bosom can get a laugh, I think scrotum definitely would. Now whether this is good or not from a class management point of view is another thing. It definitely helped to sell the play to the kids. They were scrabbling over reading parts but whether this was necessary to their enjoyment of and understanding of the text is something else. My life would've been easier if I hadn't had to contend with pre-pubescent and in some cases pubescent kids tittering at every other word, and sometimes for the wrong reasons, I might add, but it was a hook which made them listen and made them engage with the text so that they could finally understand when I explained that Shakespeare meant an idiot when he used the word ass and was playing with language because Bottom had been turned into an ass by Puck.
So is a controversial word enough to say ban the book? I don't think so, but history has shown that there will always be those who will say, 'Ban the book!' for whatever reason. Lady Chatterley's Lover is a case in point, but there are many. Read all about them at the online books page of banned books. Would you belive that Red Riding Hood features and did you know that Beverley Naidoo's novel Journey to Jo'burg was banned in South Africa under the apartheid regime? So it seems that good and sometimes apparently innocuous books can cause a reaction.
Let me share a few stories with you:
In one school where I taught, a parent complained when another teacher decided to teach Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone; someone wrote in when a colleague started to teach Stan Barstow's A Kind of Loving and another when lesbianism was touched upon in a novel. So what are we to do?
Modern and not so modern texts deal with issues that kids will face in this twentieth century world of ours - pregnancy, racism, unemployment, homosexuality, relationships, abuse and yes they do include swear words, so rather than hide from this why not arm kids to be able to deal with things in a mature way? Otherwise are we not doing them a disservice and worse still are we not preventing the next generation from evolving? Let me present a worst case scenario: if we go down this route are we not heading towards a Big Brother world? Knowledge is power. Are we going to limit who has access to this power? I'm not advocating reading books with explicit sex scenes to toddlers just raising the topical issue of censorship. I simply pose the questions. Let me know what you think. Join the debate- go on you know you want to!
In any case, judging by past records, The Higher Power of Lucky is in good company. All this publicity can't be doing the novel any harm. Kids'll want to read it just to see the offending word and adults will buy a copy just to see what all the fuss is about or to censor it- of course!
