Book banning

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

When my son was young I read Tom Sawyer  to him.  The copy of the book was out of a collection I had as a child.  It was the original prose and had not been cleaned up to make it PC.  Since we were living in the backwoods of the South I used the language in the book to teach him that certain words aren't acceptable and why.  I also explained to him that he would hear people using the same words but that didn't make it okay.  We had a brief talk about how old the book was and how things have changed, or should have changed, since the time of the writing.  

It was done as an aside and we went back to enjoying the story.  I left it open to him to ask questions and we worked through any confusion he had.

I don't agree with taking a book like Tom Sawyer or To Kill a Mockingbird off the shelves.  They can be used as a teaching tool while still telling a good story.

Hiding a book, or anything else, from kids makes it that much more interesting to them in my experience.

As you’re probably aware, I’m a HUGE Mark Twain fan. The fact that there are people who want to try to ‘improve’ on Twain makes me furious. 

Twain hated the ‘n’ word. He didn’t use it in his personal life and publicly unbraided people who did. But the idea of expurgating editions of his work to fit modern sensibilities is an attempt to gloss over the way people of that time and place actually spoke and the views they held. No one’s going to erase racism by erasing history.

Boru