{"id":1142,"date":"2017-10-02T21:25:18","date_gmt":"2017-10-02T10:25:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/?p=1142"},"modified":"2017-10-02T21:25:18","modified_gmt":"2017-10-02T10:25:18","slug":"our-dark-curriculum-materials","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/misrule.com.au\/wordpress\/our-dark-curriculum-materials\/","title":{"rendered":"Our Dark (Curriculum) Materials"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s an article on The Guardian<\/a> today getting a fair bit of traction, by Alice Pung<\/a>, along the lines of \u201cteens can handle dark topics\u201d and I have to admit, it\u2019s been bugging me all day.<\/p>\n

Look, I know I am eleven hundred and twenty years old<\/a> (give me a frickin\u2019 beer, thank you Buffy<\/em><\/a> fans), but really, haven\u2019t we had this discussion<\/a>? Like, every ten years or so?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t have any argument<\/a> with Pung herself. (I love her memoir writing, but I am in a minority of people who weren\u2019t all that enamoured of Laurinda<\/em><\/a>\u2014it was too mannered for my taste, the characters unconvincingly self-referential). But she hasn\u2019t been around YA for very long as a writer, and I doubt she\u2019s been observing trends in the reception of YA and children\u2019s books as an on-going concern.<\/p>\n

Well, I have. And she\u2019s right. There was a stink about \u201cdark YA\u201d back in the 90s when she was at school, and it did (in this country) focus largely on John Marsden<\/a>, but it was mostly in the media and schools and teachers then, as now, pretty much just got on with doing what they always do\u2014choosing the best materials for the interests and abilities of their students. And that included, by the truck load, classroom sets of John Marsden novels, including So Much to Tell You<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

And way before Marsden, there was a stink about The Outsiders<\/em><\/a> and after Marsden it was about The Hunger Games<\/em><\/a> and there was that time that a judge let someone off a swearing in public charge on the somewhat sarcastically made basis that if the CBCA Book of the Year<\/a> could have the \u2018f\u2019 word in it, society had declined so far that we could hardly expect standards of common decency to prevail, and then that abortive (pardon the kind of pun) attempt to ban Judy Blume\u2019s Forever<\/em>, because if it\u2019s not \u201cdarkness\u201d it\u2019s sex and witches and look, honestly.<\/p>\n

I remember an infamous Sydney Morning Herald take-down of the CBCA Book of the Year awards where the commissioned reviewer, who had no expertise in children’s literature, wrote with dripping disdain how disreputable the books in the older reader category shortlist were, and that he\u2019d rather his (then) 9 year old read Wuthering Heights<\/em>, ignoring the fact that the Older Readers category has never been for 9 year olds, and anyway, WUTHERING HEIGHTS?! But it was this kind of commentary that lead to a whole raft of \u201cwon\u2019t they think of the children\u201d talkback outrage. And it wasn\u2019t the schools, or teachers, leading the pack. Then, like now, though, it was the schools and teachers copping the flack.<\/p>\n

The truth is, we don\u2019t have a significant censorship problem in this country (indeed, outside of individual school policies and BOSTES guidelines, we don\u2019t have a mechanism for the kind of systematic censorship we see from school boards in\u00a0 the USA). So let\u2019s not beat one up, especially on what appears to be no more than a single anecdotal incident. Many kids and YA authors and yes, even teachers can cite anecdotes of schools asking them not to speak on certain topics, and parents requiring their children not to read books with certain content (ref. my previous comment on sex and witches). And sure, teachers and teacher-librarians will sometimes make choices about what\u2019s going to cause them the least grief, depending on their school community, and what system they\u2019re working in, and a whole host of other influences, but let\u2019s not make them the problem, when by and large they\u2019re just not.<\/p>\n

And yes, I know and indeed have long argued that the price of our [mostly] censorship-free system is eternal vigilance and I will continue to argue that. I am well aware of specific incidents at schools, such as Will Kostakis<\/a> having a school visit cancelled<\/a> after he came out, and it goes without saying that I completely condemn such acts of prejudice and protectionism (of what, I have to ask\u2014do these schools seriously think kids don\u2019t know about queer people?). Frankly, I suspect that these kinds of incidents are way more common than we get to hear about, and are far more worrying than any suggestion that schools or teachers are shying away from difficult\/challenging topics such as violence, environmental degradation, drug use, mental health or political issues.<\/p>\n

(And without getting too political myself [oh who am I kidding], I\u2019d like to stack up these incidents to see how many of them happen in private versus public schools.)<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been in and out of schools for 31 years now (longer if you count my years as a prac teacher and before that as a student), so if you\u2019ll indulge me, here are a few anecdotes of my own:<\/p>\n