I doubt parents would have a problem with the suicides. The love scenes, however, would drive them nuts.

How about this… we have high schoolers perform stage versions of Romeo and Juliet and then Girl, Interrupted and count how many parents walk out during the performance. Tell me then that there is little difference between the two.

The only problem here is that the book got on the list in the first place. But hey, this is the society that gave Toni Morrison a Nobel Prize… try having kids act out her books.

Yes, He was absolutely bawdy and there is pretty much a sexual current under much of what he writes, but the breadth and depth of his works gives teachers a lot of options when working with students. I doubt there’s a lot of modern stories that would fit that bill.

Like Moliere in his time, he was also working under pressure, whether internal (from prose to rhyming iambic pentameter, or simply reflecting the various classes of people in his plays), or external (the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the Queen).

And I agree that there are other raunchy things of the era, but you usually don’t have those assignments until college.

These are 17 and 18 year-olds we’re talking about. It’s almost a misnomer to call them “kids” in the first place. Teenagers, especially by that age, read about sex, see sex on TV and in the movies, know about sex, and have sex, and have for generations. I think Lightly Seasoned makes a wonderful point, that they rarely have the opportunity to process all that sex with an adult. Redkudu, you talk of the kids being able to process sexual imagery and content- if we are protecting them even at the senior level from “officially sanctioned” sexual content, how are they ever able to process it maturely? Are teachers not there to guide the students through being able to react to depictions of sex not with titters, but with thoughtfulness about what the portrayal is intended to convey?

Let me say again that I’m not sold on the usefulness of the text as literature at all, which is I think confusing the debate. I agree with Redkudu that we need quality controls in place to ensure that the works the students are reading are of sufficient literary merit, and aren’t chosen just to try to give them something more accessible. If this work reaches that standard, I think it shouldn’t be barred from being taught just because of the sexual content.

That said, the bowdlerizing is out of bounds in all cases. Teach it whole or don’t teach it. Jeez.

As a teacher, this is one I would put on a list for reading circles rather than a whole-class read, and I absolutely oppose the school’s “bowdlerizing.” I don’t think it should have gotten to that point at all, actually, and probably needed some serious consideration before-hand to prevent it. However, I very much doubt that the exclusion of a single book is an indication that literature teachers everywhere are saying students can’t, or shouldn’t, read about sex. As patricia pointed out, there are quite a few works in the classical canon which we return to year after year and which, in my experience, may often lead to frank discussions. I also disagree with the idea that in order to get students interested or engaged in literature we have to pander to what *we* perceive as being literature that speaks to their personal experience – we simply can’t cast that wide of a net and in attempting to may go further than is appropriate or comfortable for some of our students.

And yes, Shakespeare is usually okay because he used a lot of innuendo and double entendres to get the point across. I wouldn’t trust a modern writer writing for teens to be so careful.

And I don’t think our over-exposed teens are any more sophisticated than teens in the past. I think they think they are, which is the problem.

I say that as someone whose 14-yr. old son just walked by singing “Viva Viagra.”

Not to mention that there is A LOT of sex in many classic works (Shakespeare can be exceedingly raunchy and explicit). Is that okay because it’s more oblique? Or because it’s more classic?

I don’t know about the literary merit of the book, which I have read, but for heavens’ sake, don’t condescend to the kids by suggesting they aren’t capable of reading about sex! It’s the kind of nannying that made me hate high school and love college.