Reply to To Kill a Mockingbird

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Reply to "To Kill a Mockingbird"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Why do you ask, OP?

[b]In my opinion, it's a good book, but it's not the only good book in the world.[/b] If the curriculum doesn't include To Kill a Mockingbird, that's ok too. And as the PP says, it's definitely a book about white people, written for white people (specifically, middle-class white people).[/quote]

The bolded is the thing that always gets me about these discussions. It's a good book to read; I'd have no objection to including it on a curriculum, but there's more books worth reading in middle and high school and there is time to read them. Things fall out of the canon of high school readings all the time and are replaced by different books.

Here's some data on assigned readings in 1963: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED015175.pdf and 1988: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED309453.pdf (this also includes some information from 1900.

In 1900 kids were commonly assigned Ivanhoe, in 1963, Silas Marner and Our Town were part of the high school canon; neither were on the list in 1988. In 1963, The Great Gatsby hadn't made it to the canon yet, but it would. Between 1963 and 1988, Romeo and Juliet took off like a rocket. There's a ton of great books out there and more being written all the time, what you read in high school is going to change, like it always has.[/quote]

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