Posted on 08/04/2003 6:57:18 AM PDT by Gopher Broke
Modesto Mom Fights to Rid Classrooms of X-Rated Literature
By Jim Brown August 1, 2003
(AgapePress) - One California parent is refusing to abandon her campaign to have sexually explicit books removed from classrooms in her school district. Pamela LaChappell has been calling on the Modesto City School Board to drop the offensive literature from its required reading list.
For months now, LaChappell has been warning parents, grandparents, and taxpayers in Modesto that some of the literature being used in the city schools' advanced English classes is sexually explicit and so offensive as to be considered X-rated. She has taken her concerns to the school board, which so far has refused to drop books containing graphic details of child rape, incest, and necrophilia. Instead, the board has released an annotated list providing brief summaries of each required reading selection.
LaChappell is dissatisfied. "The lip service is that the school board wants parents to know what's in these books," she says. However, the California parent believes the real message the administration is sending, albeit in a whisper, is that they want parents to know as little as possible.
"When you look at the list and the cover letter, you really do get the impression that the administration is doing what they can to keep parents placated and to lure them into a false security," Lachappell says.
Two of the works in question are novelist Isabel Allende's House of the Spirits and David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars. Since LaChappell went public with her concerns, several students have opted out of reading one of the controversial books.
LaChappell is concerned with making other parents and citizens in her community aware of the explicit literature, but she does not want the issue to end there. "Although these books are assigned in our Modesto school system, we are learning that they are assigned all across the country," she says.
LaChappell says she has learned that the reading list is based on recommendations from the International Baccalaureate Program, an educational program out of Sweden, which was designed to provide a challenging curriculum for gifted students.
LaChappell has three children in college and a fifth-grader that she is home-schooling. Earlier this year in a Modesto Bee newspaper article, she noted that many parents operate under the mistaken assumption that their children's schools are teaching wholesome literature.
So you are wrong.
Based on the source (Agapepress) which I've mostly seen on FR as the source of rabid creationist screed, the author was certainly trying to make the woman look like a hero, not a reactionary.
A bit disturbing that so many people that home-school their kids seem to blindly accept this woman's accusations without having read either of the two books (and the people on the thread who have universally seem amazed that either book could be considered X-rated.)
At a March 3 Board of Education meeting, LaChapell objected to "The House of the Spirits" by Isabel Allende, "Snow Falling on Cedars" by David Guterson and "The Color Purple" by Alice Walker.
Since then, she has added "Cold Mountain" by Charles Frazier and "The Handmaid's Tale" by Margaret Atwood to her list. She said she is adding books as complaints roll in from like-minded parents.
I have read "Snow Falling on Cedars" and "The Handmaid's Tale". "Cedars" is a beautiful book that does have as one element a love affair between two teens, but it is hardly pornographic. I put it on my 14 year olds reading list for this summer.
"The Handmaids Tale" is a deeply disturbing book about the United States after an environmental disaster has left most women sterile. The women who are healthy are rounded up and given to couples as "breeding stock". The men essentially rape the "Handmaids". There is also a stringly anti-religious theme. NOT recommended for teens, although I think a college aged kid could handle it.
Take a look at HomeSat by Bob Jones University. Their curriculum is already a favorite among homeschoolers and Christian schools and now they offer instruction based upon that curriculum over satellite. It is very affordable ($100-$200 for satellite receiver equipment, $35 per month for the family, curriculum costs extra) and you get a certified teacher who teaches the subjects using all kinds of audio/video/computer tools. We have it for our kids and we like it. You can get more info at www.homesat.com.
No detail? Which parts of what books?
In the books mentioned in this article, I can't think of anything that couldn't be found in Time or Newsweek, not to mention People or Cosmopolitan, all of which are available to teenagers (with pictures!). I would much rather my daughter read House of the Spirits than Teen People or Cosmo Girl!
To call these novels X-rated is just weird, IMO, unless they also say that about the local newspaper and CNN.
The books that have X-rated parts.
There, run rings around you logically.
I will home school my kids and they will likely not read anything I have not read before hand, but there are those on the extremes of both sides that are causing an increasingly polarized environment for raising children.
I've always felt I was born 2 generations too late. I would have been more comfortable in my Grandparents generation than I am in my own (minus the whole racism and lack of air conditioning thing).
I'm even a rabid creationist :-), but I still think this is bizarre.
No Christian fundamentalist society could possibly be organized the way the book portrays or have the moral system the book describes.
The concept of a "handmaid" is wholly alien to any Christian society that has ever existed, as is the condemnation of literacy qua literacy.
LOL....I sent excerpts of the "White Cadillac" book my young step G daughter read from her school library to the school board, and the newspapers......
This woman needs to get a life. This reminds me of when I went to a meeting to hear about the sex education program at my son's junior high school. A teacher did a very good job of explaining it and most of the parents there seemed to be quite satisfied. But there were two women in the room who had many complaints. The teacher and the other parents listened politely, but eventually it became clear that these women didn't even have children in the public school.
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