And they’re going to get a fine education without that book on the reading list.” More kids are going to read it now as a result of all this. “I don’t consider this a ban,” said Summers, who owns a local service station and spoke highly of Keller-Gage as a teacher. “I don’t know who considers it a literary classic.”Īnd he said the board decision has drawn far less interest from district residents than from outsiders and the media. “I had a hard time staying with it,” he said. On the other hand, school board President Jim Summers said he reread the book recently and was not impressed. Keller-Gage said the chronicle of Caulfield’s adolescent odyssey drew special interest from her teen-age students, including some who shun books regardless of their content. The book is known for the funny, poignant and foul-mouthed narration of Caulfield, a troubled preparatory-school student from New York who has become a quintessential antihero of American literature. Keller-Gage, who gave students the option of studying alternate books if their parents objected to the Salinger novel, said the board has suppressed a widely taught literary classic. It isn’t something I asked for, but it is a cause that I believe in and I do believe there has been an injustice done.”
WHY IS THE CATCHER IN THE RYE BANNED HOW TO
“It’s a few townspeople telling us how to teach our kids. “It’s a dangerous step,” she said of the ban. It is an ironic coincidence, you might say.” “I’m not doing it in relation to the school board decision. “I taught ‘Fahrenheit 451' last fall,” Keller-Gage said.
The district serves about 3,000 students who live in and around Boron, a desert town in the northeastern Antelope Valley. Salinger’s 1951 novel about the adolescent crisis of Holden Caulfield. Keller-Gage said Monday that the presence of “Fahrenheit 451" in her curriculum is not intended as retaliation at the Muroc Joint Unified School District board for banning the study of “The Catcher in the Rye,” J.D. Boron High School students will not be studying “The Catcher in the Rye” this year because of a recent school board decision to remove the critically acclaimed novel from the school reading list after some parents said its content was unsuitable for teen-agers.īut later this month, students in Shelley Keller-Gage’s English class will read “Fahrenheit 451,” Ray Bradbury’s novel about a future in which government has banned individual thinking, television dominates society and firemen burn books.