Alaskan school board lifts ban on Gatsby and Catch 22 after protests
about 5 years in The guardian
The Matanuska-Susitna borough in Palmer restores modern classics by authors including F Scott Fitzgerald and Joseph Heller to curriculum after community action
Classic novels including The Great Gatsby and Catch-22 have been returned to the curriculum in Palmer, Alaska, after a widespread community protest against their removal.
The Matanuska-Susitna borough school board in Palmer, Alaska had voted in April to pull five titles from its curriculum for high-school English: F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, and short-story collection The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien. Issues with Angelou’s acclaimed memoir included its “sexually explicit material, such as the sexual abuse the author suffered as a child, and its ‘anti-white’ messaging”, while Catch-22 was criticised, among other things, for letting characters “speak with typical ‘military men’ misogyny and racist attitudes of the time”. Continue reading...
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