The Matanuska-Susitna Borough School District in the city of Palmer, Alaska, decided in a 5-2 vote to remove several important books off the curriculum offered to the roughly 16,000 students it oversees, NBC reported .
The list includes the 1925 novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the 1969 autobiographical work by Maya Angelou I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the 1956 novel Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, Joseph Heller’s 1961 satire Catch-22 and the 1990 work by Vietnam War veteran Time O'Brien The Things They Carried. Many of these books were turned into films.
While the specific reasons the books were taken out are different, all of them were deemed too difficult for the students to handle and an unfair challenge for the teachers to face. The books were not removed from school libraries and students may still borrow them and read them on their own if they so wish.
Caged Bird was deemed to carry an “anti-white message” and Gatsby and The Things contained “sexual references,” the report stated. “Bad language” was the reason Ellison's book was removed and violence the reason Catch-22 was taken out.
School board vice president Jim Hart justified the decision saying that reading such books in the modern workplace would not be accepted, so why should they be read in schools?Dianne K. Shibe, president of the Mat-Su Education Association teachers union, said teachers will ask the board to reconsider the decision.
"The union is all about educating students, and this flies in the face of educating students," she said.
Hart added that he thinks it’s unfair to ask teachers to teach such sensitive books as they are teachers and not, for example, counselors.
Other books that were discussed, but not taken out, were the 1906 novel The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and the 1843 Charles Dickens work A Christmas Carol, with those in favor of their removal arguing that they might be understood to support socialism.
Meanwhile, demand for the original five books that were removed is growing as readers show their support by buying copies and asking store owners to give it to interested people for free should they ask about them.
"I don't think they realized they were treading on censorship, and people are completely opposed to censorship," owner of Fireside Books in Palmer, Mary Ann Cockle, told NBC.