Joan DelFattore: Huck Finn, Hostile? Hardly.
[Joan DelFattore is a professor of English and legal studies at the University of Delaware. She is the author of Knowledge in the Making: Academic Freedom and Free Speech in America's Schools and Universities, recently published by Yale University Press.]
In their new book, Academically Adrift, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that after two years of college, 45 percent of students show no improvement in critical thinking and complex reasoning. A week after that study appeared, NewSouth Books announced that its forthcoming Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn has been purged of the troubling word "nigger."
Let us connect the dots.
The elimination of "nigger" is presented not as censorship but as a rescue mission to save Huck Finn from oblivion, because many secondary schools will not teach material that makes students uncomfortable. Indeed, according to the introduction to the new edition, "Even at the level of college and graduate school, students are capable of resenting textual encounters with this racial appellative." The sacrifice of just one word—one nasty, offensive, mean-spirited little word—is a small price to pay for returning one of the great works of American literature to the reading lists from which it has been expunged. So the argument runs....
Read entire article at CHE
In their new book, Academically Adrift, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa report that after two years of college, 45 percent of students show no improvement in critical thinking and complex reasoning. A week after that study appeared, NewSouth Books announced that its forthcoming Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn has been purged of the troubling word "nigger."
Let us connect the dots.
The elimination of "nigger" is presented not as censorship but as a rescue mission to save Huck Finn from oblivion, because many secondary schools will not teach material that makes students uncomfortable. Indeed, according to the introduction to the new edition, "Even at the level of college and graduate school, students are capable of resenting textual encounters with this racial appellative." The sacrifice of just one word—one nasty, offensive, mean-spirited little word—is a small price to pay for returning one of the great works of American literature to the reading lists from which it has been expunged. So the argument runs....