Ignorant bastards.

I suspect the reason the Christianist Cretins still go after ol' Kurt is that our culture hasn't come up with any writer equal in both quality and controversy since.

After searching some more on the internets, the dude, Scroggins, is a complete wanker. I can totally see him in congress.

I can't wait until my kid is old enough for me to give her all the books that nutjobs want to keep out of schools.

After a yearlong fight, the Republic district’s school board voted unanimously Monday to ban Mr. Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five,” and Sarah Ockler’s “Twenty Boy Summer,” based on the complaints of Republic resident Wesley Scroggins, a professor of management at Missouri State University, and the father of several home-schooled children.

If your kids are home-schooled, why do you care?

Amusing side-note: the inserted "similar article" was about the ability to rent books on Kindle. Can't find these books in your school? Have you found the internet?

And how does a parent of home-schooled kids get a job at a STATE University? Oh, wait, he's in the Business department, where they are all devoted Free Marketeers (except where their own paycheck comes from).

THat's on the Top 100 Most Challenged Books list.

If you don't want your kids to think for themselves, not letting them read Vonnegut is a really good move.

The funny thing is, Slaughterhouse-Five is definitely not the most subversive of his books. I suppose it's just the most 'classic' and thus most likely to be read in high schools - as it deals with the heavy themes of WWII and the futility of war in general, and all.

You know, it might be fun to start a charity which would do this: every time a book is banned from a school curriculum or a library, the charity would airlift hundreds of copies of that book to the same town and give them away for free.

I can't wait until my friends' kids are old enough for me to give them all the books (and music and movies!) that nutjobs want to keep out of schools.

(It's amusing how much overlap there is between "Most Challenged Books" and "Standard Recommended Offerings of Any Merely Decent Basic High School Literature Program")

I just shake my head now at the money wasted by these pursuits.

Here's the School Board's rationale:

School officials stressed that the move was not a judgment call on the merit of the books, but a decision on whether the books were appropriate for high school students.

“We very clearly stayed out of discussion about moral issues,” Republic School Superintendent Vern Minor told the Republic newspaper. “Our discussions from the get-go were age-appropriateness.”

Mr. Minor said “Twenty Boy Summer” sensationalized sexual promiscuity and included questionable language, drunkenness, lying to parents, and a lack of remorse, while “Slaughterhouse Five” contained crude language and adult themes that are more appropriate for college-age students, according to the Republic newspaper.

I am sure this will help them when the ACLU sues.

Also, do they have any idea what these kids are seeing on TV and the Internet??

I taught Vonnegut's Cats Cradle to tenth graders and the air just crackled with cerebral electricity. Heaven forbid, kids should think critically or look at anything more challenging than America's Got Talent. Next, will Missouri ban Shakespeare?
After all his plays feature cross dressing, incest, patricide, treason, anti semitism, adultery, regicide, murder, racially mixed marriages, and children who defy their parents and elope. I guess high schoolers can only read The Cat in The Hat. Oops, that novel encourages children to rebel against parents.

Kurt Vonnegut's experience as a soldier and prisoner of war had a profound influence on his later work. As a private with the 423rd Infantry Regiment, 106th Infantry Division, Vonnegut was captured during the Battle of the Bulge on December 19, 1944, after the 106th was cut off from the rest of Courtney Hodges's First Army. "The other American divisions on our flanks managed to pull out: We were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren't much good against tanks..."[8] Imprisoned in Dresden, Vonnegut was chosen as a leader of the POWs because he spoke some German. After telling the German guards "...just what I was going to do to them when the Russians came..." he was beaten and had his position as leader taken away.[9] While a prisoner, he witnessed the fire bombing of Dresden in February 1945 which destroyed most of the city.

Vonnegut was one of a group of American prisoners of war to survive the attack in an underground slaughterhouse meat locker used by the Germans as an ad hoc detention facility. The Germans called the building Schlachthof Fünf (Slaughterhouse Five) which the Allied POWs adopted as the name for their prison. Vonnegut said the aftermath of the attack was "utter destruction" and "carnage unfathomable." This experience was the inspiration for his famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, and is a central theme in at least six of his other books. In Slaughterhouse-Five he recalls that the remains of the city resembled the surface of the moon, and that the Germans put the surviving POWs to work, breaking into basements and bomb shelters to gather bodies for mass burial, while German civilians cursed and threw rocks at them.[9] Vonnegut eventually remarked, "There were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Germans sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes."[10]

Vonnegut was repatriated by Red Army troops in May 1945 at the Saxony-Czechoslovakian border.[9] Upon returning to America, he was awarded a Purple Heart for what he called a "ludicrously negligible wound,"[11][12] later writing in Timequake that he was given the decoration after suffering a case of "frostbite".[13]

From his wikipedia article.

Slaughterhouse Five is, in places, thinly "disguised" autobiography. It's as subversive a book as any written at the time. And it should be required reading along with Hiroshima by John Hersey. In fact I made sure that both my son and my wife's son read Hiroshima. And then we discussed it.

I knew that Hiroshima would disturb them. Maybe give them nightmares. But that is the point of the book. If we don't teach our children about the horrors of nuclear war, who will? The movies? TV?

I know that when I read it in JHS 162, it gave me nightmares. The whole "skin glove slipping off" part haunts me even today. And so it should. If you haven't read it, do so.

Hi Ho

contained crude language and adult themes that are more appropriate for college-age students

Because high school students, especially boys, are blushing innocents who would keel over dead rather than drop an f-bomb.

I was reading at a college level in sixth grade. At least according to the tests. I remember reading Portnoy's Complaint. It was in the attic hidden in a pile of my father's books. While it gave me a rather skewed look at sex, it was also confusing. I had never heard the word "cock" until reading it. And honestly didn't understand what it was. Then further searching got me a Screw paper. And I knew what a cock was. And other things. I learned and grew, but not to the size in the Screw. They even had a "Peter Meter" in that issue. Wow was I bummed.

Anyway, I survived parent's porn. And I still have a reasonably stable mind. Sort of...

This thread makes me once again wish we had favorites.

Particularly incensing:

whether the books were appropriate for high school students

Appropriate? How many high school students have headed to Iraq and Afghanistan in the days after graduation? Somehow I have a suspicion they could have handled this book.

Or written it.