How Can Literature Not Be Taught In Schools

Different literature is often banned in schools and one of the main causes of this is because of what is considered inappropriate language for the students. Most texts should not be banned or challenged due to profanity and should stay incorporated in the curriculum by teachers for students to learn from due to the learning and lack of negative consequence that they cause. The largest group to request books to be taken out of curriculums is upset parents and many times it does cause the school to have to remove it. Parents might object to the language in a book and not want their children exposed to it but many important novels such as The Kite Runner and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time ("Top"). These books both are much …show more content…
In a school environment it is impossible to control everything that a students is exposed to and hears.When a book is banned due to profanity it is to control what a students hears yet in a school worse language is heard everyday. If a book is read in a class it is not as though it is encouraging every event that occurs; after a student reads Shakespeare they are not going to go out and talk in Early Modern English. A concerned parents may assume that being exposed to language will have an impact but it would be due to their environment no the book they read in english class. Having profanity will not increase the likelihood that a students will curse. In fact, in a typical high school environment students hear from 80 to 90 curse words a day which is more than most books banned for profanity have (Glover); and “0.7% of the words a person uses in the course of a day are swear words” (Steinmetz). To be concerned that a book with several swears may have an impact on language of a student seems injudicious because of the everyday setting for a student. When questioned on whether swears read in books during class had any impact on the language used outside of class one students said that, “In the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the n-word is used a lot, and in class nobody wanted to read the word out loud, because we already knew it was …show more content…
The Kite Runner has five swears in it and two of them are when a character referred to Baba is drunk and says, “‘Because if I don’t go down, I’m tearing him to pieces, goddamn him father’” (Hosseini 116). The profanity here is developing his character and showing how in distress he is on a topic. It is used for emphasis and would be less impactful without the swear. In The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time swearing is used throughout the novel but this is because it is told from the point of view of a teenager with aspergers so he writes down dialogue exactly as he hears it. However, the main character, Christopher Boone, can not understand emotions so he can, “ not register their feelings, [so he] puts in no exclamation marks” (Mullan). The book starts with Christopher finding his neighbor's dog dead so he goes to look at it which causes his neighbor to react by shouting, “‘Let go of the fucking dog’” (Haddon). To fully capture the events that lead to Christopher’s reaction it is important to have a realistic story. The events that transpire after Christopher is shouted at are informational to how someone with a form of autism views a stressful situation. The language also serves to show how he does not comprehend the tone or implications of what is being said. By not have exclamation marks it is shown that even using