After reviewing the American Library Association’s list of the nation’s 100 most banned books, English teacher Kate Weymouth found that Gunn’s English department taught 18 of the 100 — including classic novels such as Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and memoirs like Jeannette Walls’ “Glass Castle.” An overwhelming majority of these works cover the experiences of marginalized groups or include mentions of sexuality and violence, drawing ire from school districts across the country.
The controversy surrounding these books doesn’t deter Weymouth from choosing to teach them. “People happen to ban books that are grappling with these real-world issues,” she said. “Why are we reading literature if not to grapple with these issues?”
Weymouth has taught banned books such as Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” in class. She lists George Orwell’s “1984” as an example of a novel that features “problematic” topics, including misogyny and sexual assault. “Reading (about these issues) in a book in a class gives you an opportunity to critique the problems and call them (out) for what they are,” she said. “Just because students are reading it doesn’t mean they have to read it blindly and accept what the text is saying about it.”
Weymouth believes that book bans fail to give credit to what students are capable of understanding. “Banning books deprives (students) of opportunities to think about the world as it actually is,” she said. “It attempts to keep kids in a false state of innocence that doesn’t actually let them develop their moral, ethical and intellectual capacities.”
Weymouth keeps these banned books in her curriculum due to the books’ artistic merits and her belief that these fictional stories can help students make sense of the world around them. “(Books are) an ideal way to expose people to things that are challenging and complex about our world,” she said. Weymouth has also increased diversity in her curriculum by including other media forms tackling social issues, such as the music video “This is America,” by rapper Childish Gambino. “I think that we need to deconstruct that ivory tower kind of attitude towards literature, and we also need to broaden what we’re looking at in terms of having artistic merit,” Weymouth said.
—Written by Maddie Cheung
George Orwell’s “1984” is banned due to obscenity and passages that could be interpreted as supporting communism.
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