>>16276275 PB PB

>A Dubuque Community Schools committee is recommending the removal of three books from the district’s curriculum after students raised concerns about their content.

>The novels — “Of Mice and Men,” “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” — would be removed from the district’s required reading list for high school students due to their significant use of racial slurs. They still would be made available in school libraries.

These books are still good teaching tools and could lead to conversations about how far we have come as a society-it used to be acceptable to use these slurs and works of literature could contain these words and concepts and still be published and mainstreamed. There is value in this if only to teach students that we continue to progress in our views and acceptance of each other….

When my kids were younger I read children classics out loud to them at bedtime, including Tom Sawyer. This book also is filled with slurs, I just left the word out as I read, as I knew my youngest in particular would have been repeating it everywhere he went. These are still great stories. Again, we can't hide the past from the children of today. We need them to learn from it.