Offering frequent news and analysis from the majestic Evergreen State and beyond, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's unconventional perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Challenging the students

The Puyallup school board has decided eighth grade instructors will continue to teach the Ernest J. Gaines novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman.
The Puyallup School Board voted 5-0 Monday night to uphold an earlier decision by a district committee requiring eighth-graders to read the novel.

The board made the decision in considering an appeal from a parent and a group of six teachers who challenged the requirement. The challengers said that while the novel is a valuable and compelling account of its period, its complicated content, including implied incest and rape, and heavy use of racial slurs made it inappropriate for eighth-graders.
This case is interesting because it doesn't seem to involve the usual fundamentalist attempts to censor material, but rather earnest concerns about adult themes and racial epithets.

There's a lot of talk right now about challenging students in light of proposed modifications to WASL requirements. While math and science are important, if we're going to have a high-quality educational system that means everything, including presenting students with challenging and even controversial literature. Although I'm a little unclear why Jane Pittman qualifies as controversial. Slavery and Jim Crow were horrid, ugly, despicable institutions. If you're going to tell the truth about them, well, there are going to be ugly parts.

In a 2002 interview interview in Sojourners magazine, Gaines had this to say about his work:
Brown: Gordon Thompson, a professor of African-American literature, says, "Gaines writes about the small minded and misguided only if he can love them." You are startlingly evenhanded in your books. You complicate characters like the white jailer, Paul, in A Lesson Before Dying. We're all set to see a stereotype and you jar us with a good white person.

Gaines: When I first went to California, we were living in government project housing, and there were different races there—white, black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American—all there together. I met some bastards, but I met some white guys who would just do anything to help; some of them would bend over backwards to help you. I've known "Pauls" who have come back to Louisiana to teach.

Brown: You don't really have heroes and villains. Even the good people have flaws, and the bad folks have their moments of grace.

Gaines: Sure. Someone criticized the ending of A Gathering of Old Men because of my treatment of Luke Will. They said I was helping the KKK because of Luke Will's speech asking someone to look after his wife and kids. "Why'd you make him so human at the end?" someone asked. Well, he is human. He just cannot accept certain things. He cannot accept this black man, but he loves his own little child. He's a human being.
Sounds to me like the Puyallup school board is to be congratulated for making a tough but good call. This is how we wind up with quality education. Number two pencils are all well and good, but in the end filling in the oval only goes so far.

More-- For all the other old dudes and dudettes out there who remember, yes, Cicely Tyson was incredible in the 1974 television adaptation. And no, you probably couldn't get that film made today, at least not for network broadcast.

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