Book banning

[Spongebob]

This to me is just an argument actually to keep teaching the book in schools.  You can always learn new things from old stories. Sometimes what the story teaches you, sometimes what the story doesn't teach you, and sometimes how silly the whole story is to begin with and shouldn't have even been written to begin with!  But even that last case you want to leave it there just to prove that point.

If you just ban the story, you'll never be able to go back and look various arguments, however contrarian to each other, surrounding it.  I think the point of fiction is not as much about the morals it teaches you or nudge you towards certain direction, but rather how it stimulates fantasies in people's mind in various directions.

Well, to be clear, the point of using a book to examine real culture is to stimulate the imagination and challenge accepted values.  To make the reader/student questions what they know and/or believe.  As a work of fiction, TKAM is superb, but as a stimulant for racial norms, it's only sub-par.  There are vastly better books available for this purpose and I think that's the salient point here.  In the case of Tom Robinson, his innocence is so absolute that the likely moral that students get from it is that something this egregious could never happen now.  Racial justice is far better now and its likely they will see it as just preachy.  I think books like Twelve Years a Slave does a far better job of challenging people on their racial values as well as educates them on actual history.  Also, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass does both better as well and is compelling as a story.

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Scout may have been what Harper Lee used to tell a story she was well familiar with.  After all, she was a white female child in the American South.

Yeah, it's pretty clear she was writing from her own perspective and I don't criticize that.  But when viewed as a narrative on racial justice it comes up fairly short.  What can an eight year old white girl really teach us about deeply seeded racism in the south?  Really we only learn what she, herself can ask about it in the story and Atticus's answers are doled out as an adult would do for a young child.  They just don't tell us much.

FWIW, I found Scout's interest in Boo Ridley far more compelling and enlightening because as young people (and humans) we are inclined to fear what we don't understand, but Scout is far more courageous and inquisitive than most children her age.