Comments on: Missouri State business-school professor leads successful campaign to ban Slaughterhouse-Five from local schools

By: Jay Diamond

Jay Diamond — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 02:20:00 +0000

wow now i need to read those books :D

By: Chris Roberts

Chris Roberts — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:07:00 +0000

I live thirty minutes from Republic and did not know this was going on. A little decent news coverage could have prevented this.

By: Chris Roberts

Chris Roberts — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 00:06:00 +0000

I live thirty minutes from Republic and did not know this was going on. A little decent news coverage could have prevented this.

By: Moe Hong

Moe Hong — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 23:43:00 +0000

Let’s buy a copy of Slaughterhouse Five for every single kid at the high school: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Buy-copies-of-Slaughterhouse-Five-for-students-in-Republic-MO/264339346913371

By: MHS

MHS — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 18:49:00 +0000

There is one, compiled by the American Library Association, and it can be found here:
http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/challengedbydecade/index.cfm

By: sighthndman

sighthndman — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 18:11:00 +0000

But then what would my children read?

By: sighthndman

sighthndman — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 18:02:00 +0000

“and so it goes” will not get you banned.

By: sighthndman

sighthndman — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 17:51:00 +0000

Whoa, I don’t know how your figure that. I homeschooled mine so they could read more, write more, progress in math and science without waiting for the rest of the class to catch up, but mostly because (short version) the teachers are idiots. Got nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with education.

By: phuzz

phuzz — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 14:03:00 +0000

Perhaps we need a centralised list of books that have been banned in schools, we could call it “Recommended Reading”.

By: Lodewijk Gonggrijp

Lodewijk Gonggrijp — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 10:01:00 +0000

The banning of Slaughterhouse-Five upsets me so much I almost posted something which would probably get me perma-banned instantly. Use your imagination to fill in the dots.

By: Jeffrey Wu

Jeffrey Wu — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 05:24:00 +0000

Well thank you boing boing and amazon for facilitating an improptu buy. I now have an copy of 20 Boy Summer. It was 4 bucks. Course, now I need to get to reading it.

Also I read “Speak” in my high school, possibly the more disturbing book I’ve read at that point in my life.

By: Aaron Tye

Aaron Tye — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 05:09:00 +0000

meh. anyone who bans that book will burn in hell anyway. i don’t worship the government and i’m not sorry.

By: cub

cub — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 04:56:00 +0000

plus bigotry– oy! the bigotry!

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 02:35:00 +0000

And a shout out to Mrs Long, who handed me Out of the Closets: Voices of Gay Liberation in a high school English class in 1973.

By: David Yoon

David Yoon — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 01:24:00 +0000

There are THAT MANY Koreans in Missouri? DID NOT KNOW THAT

By: knoxblox

knoxblox — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 01:17:00 +0000

I would like to utilize this post to give a posthumous shout-out to my kindergarten teacher, Miss March, who once taught at L’Ouverture Elementary in Wichita, KS.
The woman taught me to read at the age of four, and I will always love her for it, because she also encouraged me to read whatever I could get my hands on.

By: jccalhoun

jccalhoun — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:49:00 +0000

Don’t bother emailing this guy. Look at the date of the story:Sep. 17, 2010. So this is old news and little can be done by complaining to the guy nearly a year later.

By: Kirk Kittell

Kirk Kittell — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:35:00 +0000

First thing that came to mind as a response:

“Go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut,” murmured Paul Lazzaro in his azure nest. “Go take a flying fuck at the moon.”

By: digibruce

digibruce — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 23:29:00 +0000

“Scroggins apparently wants to raise a generation of local children who never meet a challenging idea or experience an uncomfortable discussion. As an actual entrepreneur (and not just someone who researches entrepreneurship), I’m here to tell you that this is not how you teach people the imagination and creativity necessary to the process”

Cory, have you ever worked at a conventional business with an HR department? Because HR departments want to product ADULTS from any challenging ideas or experiences or uncomfortable discussions. So it’s not surprising a business professor thinks this is a good idea for kids.

By: perizade

perizade — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Please don’t slam the poor kids who have no control over this. I know some adults who were homeschooled evangelical style, and they worked hard to overcome the hardships their parents put on them.

By: perizade

perizade — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 22:44:00 +0000

I really wish I could believe that. I am a school media specialist, and this just often isn’t true. Kids don’t even have a chance to look at a banned book list, have access to the books, and plenty aren’t motivated to expand their horizons.

By: Gyrofrog

Gyrofrog — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 22:13:00 +0000

Why not? Remember SomaliAnarchy.com, “Defending and Celebrating Somalis’ Freedom and Prosperity”?

http://web.archive.org/web/20050405010208/http://www.somalianarchy.com/

(The “somalianarchy.com” domain is now a placeholder.)

By: Walter Guyll

Walter Guyll — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 22:13:00 +0000

The silencing hasn’t worked anyway so you may have a point.

By: Walter Guyll

Walter Guyll — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 22:12:00 +0000

sisyphus321, I’m sorry if I carelessly called you incompetent. I’ve become a bit allergic to every discussion about a libertarian point of view devolves into someone shouting Somalia! Liberia is a somewhat refreshing change.

Libertarians, as opposed to anarchists, do admit to a strong but limited role for government: protecting one, through law and the courts, from force, fraud and theft. Liberia, with it’s recent history of a military coup and a civil war is not a shining example of libertarianism. Things now seem to be improving there and maybe I should send them a copy of Friedman’s Capitalism And Freedom…

As to a better model of libertarian life, I’ll say the United States, warts and all. Could be better…

And I think it is entirely fair to say that there are systemic problems with U.S. public schools and that many of those ills result from them being run by the state.

By: Gyrofrog

Gyrofrog — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 22:02:00 +0000

I can see that as an Onion headline: “Literature fans protest addition of ‘Catcher in the Rye’ to required reading list”

By: Jeff van Booven

Jeff van Booven — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 22:01:00 +0000

I would ask that you not send a bunch of e-mails to him. That’s the e-mail his students send things to as well and it makes it harder for them to get through to their professor, no matter how much of a jackass he is. It’s hard enough sometimes to keep up with student e-mails, and I only teach two classes.

If you really feel motivated, you could always send any sort of cash or gift cards to the English Department GA’s. I know we’d really appreciate anything that would allow us to eat more. :P

By: Antinous / Moderator

Antinous / Moderator — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 21:57:00 +0000

Um, no. It just says that his name will show up eventually.

Citing Godwin’s Law to silence critics, on the other hand….

By: Jeff van Booven

Jeff van Booven — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 21:55:00 +0000

The worst part is that Dr. Scroggins hasn’t really read the books. I’ve read his official complaint and what he claims is in these books is simply not, except for the swearing. For complaining about books being anti-religious, he never picked up on any of it in Slaughterhouse 5.

Then again, as an example of just how bad this region is, I got hate mail for leading a protest against this jackass on campus. So, with my full name plastered all over the local newspaper, the author misspelled my first name. And not just spelling it Geoff. Link if you want to read the letter: http://blagotube.onehourparkingshow.com/?p=1225

Also; as somebody else working at the university, please refrain from sending e-mails to Scroggin’s university e-mail account. He may be an overbearing jackass, but it’s not fair to his students.Sometimes it’s hard enough to keep up with important student and university e-mails. If it wasn’t because of the students I’d have no qualms about it at all.

By: sisyphus321

sisyphus321 — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 21:49:00 +0000

I don’t think Godwin’s law is so much about the competence of a debator (thanks a lot, by the way), but more about having a sense of proportion. For instance, we could compare Scroggins to Hitler (censorship), but that’s really out of line considering that despite his faults, Scroggins is unlikely to be directly responsible for industrial-scale genocide, violent repression of the citizens or starting a world war. I’ll ask again – do you have a better model of libertarianism than Liberia? And as long as I’m writing about proportion, I still think think your unqualified condemnation of public schools is unwarranted.

By: Thad Boyd

Thad Boyd — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 21:42:00 +0000

Motherfucker.