Movie…eh…Novel Monday: “Slaughterhouse Five” Banned Reading in Missouri High School
August 15th, 2011
Even when he’s dead, Kurt Vonnegut can still cause trouble.
Last week, Republic High School in Missouri banned the author’s 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five from its assigned reading list due to the book’s promotion of “false conceptions of American history and government”. The book is a science-fiction account of the World War II bombing of Dresden, Germany, an ordeal Mr. Vonnegut survived as a prisoner-of-war in the city.
As a response, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library decided to donate free copies of the book to the 150 students who the reading list change affected. According to Julia Whitehead, the executive director of the library, she found it “shocking” that high school students weren’t mature enough to handle the story, especially since it can teach a lot of different morals and lessons to a lot of different people.
This wasn’t the only incident of book-banning this week. In Virginia, a school district banned the Sherlock Holmes story A Study in Scarlet for its anti-mormon themes. Banning books in general is not a good idea, especially if the only reason you can come up with is that it upsets people. If one’s ways of thought aren’t challenged, how will we ever know what is right or what is wrong?
