Posted on 01/25/2010 1:04:16 PM PST by Dallas59
A Southern California school district has pulled dictionaries from classrooms because a parent complained when a child came across the term "oral sex."
District officials said Friday that the Menifee Union School District -- which serves 9,000 kindergartners through eight graders in Riverside County -- is forming a committee to consider a permanent classroom ban of the Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.
A memo from Assistant Superintendent Karen Valdes acknowledged it is a respected resource but district officials found that "a number of referenced words are age-inappropriate."
Some parents and free-speech advocates said the district is overreacting.
Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition says "common sense seems to be lacking in this school."
Menifee is a city of about 67,000 people 80 miles southeast of Los Angeles.
Are they also going to pull history books that mention Bill Clinton?
Looks like they don’t.
Common sense is so completely lacking in public education as a whole, that most school districts widely implement "zero tolerance" policies on any number of harmless behaviors and routinely punish whole groups of students for the misbehaviors of a few, or even one, of them.
If a teacher or administrator is so thoroughly lacking in basic judgment, then that person should find a different career.
I think it is just fine for the words “oral” and “sex” to be in the dictionary....on completely different pages. Otherwise, it’s a ‘phrase’ and really shouldn’t be in a dictionary. Perhaps an encyclopedia.
Hello!?
There is a good reason why it is a ‘collegiate’ dictionary.
Children’s dictionaries do exist. Those should be in grade schools.
Over a word?........Hell, 50 years ago we used to go to the library to “read” National Geographic!.............
My thought exactly. Obviously no one looked up the word (Collegiate).
Gee, that was why I always liked the American Heritage dictionary. It had ALL the words.
It’s probably the definition of b***j*b or many other single words that describe that act.
Tell the little rugrats that oral sex means talking about it! < /sarc >
With the Ca school system in turmoil by any objective analysis, we ban dictionaries ?
Unreal
I wonder if they have multiple definitions for ‘hummer’ besides the vehicle.
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