The loss of innocence has progressed so far that Josh immediately starts beating Lightener to a bloody pulp, and if that isn’t bad enough, Josh proceeds to tie him up and take him to a cliff to push him off of it. His buddies convince him not to, so he leaves him there to die. This scene depicts the true loss of innocence that has occurred throughout the novel. Josh went from an on edge kid who wanted to hear back from his father to a ragingly angered teen who wanted to kill the one person who could give him any news about his father. These are things we might not have picked up on simply
They feared Richard, and some of the white people felt it necessary to act out their racist feelings in order to cover up their fear. White coworkers beat Richard because his boss was kind to him. Richard later had to leave a good job because those racist co-workers would “kill” him. When the principal at Richard’s school had asked Richard to give a speech to a large audience of white and black people, Richard refused to read the principal’s prepared speech. By reading the principal’s speech, Richard was saying what the white power wanted him to say and to Richard this would be giving in to the very thing he hated so much.
So, why do school boards choose to keep such books away from children when hundreds of other people say that these books have academic value? William Faulkner, for example, is an author whose books have appeared on the banned books list and have been challenged by a number of school districts. Yet, in most advanced placement classes his works are a required read. What is it that makes books such as his cause people to ban them? The novel As I Lay Dying is one of William Faulkner’s more famous works.
Some people may think that racism is a fairly recent thing. Little do they know that racism has existed in our society since the colonial era. Whenever I think of the word racism I imagine the 60‘s when just about everything was segregated and Martin Luther King gave his famous “I have a Dream” speech. However I also may as well be thinking of the early 1700‘s when racism was really kicking off with the newfound “Indians”, also known as Native Americans. Following this explosion of racism was scientists and philosophers wondering if a different race was the same as a different species.
Some major industrialists and aristocrats supported Hitler’s strong ants of the anti-Jewish and anti communism stance. These ideas were later carried out through the great Holocaust. The Holocausts had killed more than 6 million Jewish men and women through the death camps during the Nazi’s rein. This hatred for the Jewish gradually spread throughout the country and racial biology was taught at school, that the Jewish were inferior, impure and not German. The Jews had to be gotten rid of.
The elders, Howard and Ethel, are the first ones to rob Bobby, suggesting the elder generation relying on the efforts and losses of the next. They do a war dance, but the younger generation drums too quickly, leaving the elders breathless. This suggests that the cultural disturbance has grown too big for the elders to fight, so they just give up. Ethel would, if she had money, spend everything to get her son out of jail, again, indicating the impotence of the elders to protect or defend their offspring. The middle aged, Bobby Lee, Thompson, Alice, Betty, Marie and Eulahlah behave as if they have lost all hope except for the
Moore heard a talk show person talk about how people do not even know basic literature and when Moore calls up the talk show person the person did not even know what the books were. This shows how people talk about how bad teachers are but the teachers are not the problem. He talks about how humans live in a democracy when they live in America, but students learn in a totalitarian government when they are in schools. This shows how schools cannot do anything to protect themselves due to the pressure that the government is putting on them. Moore also describes a situation where a school that is sponsoring Coco-Cola has a picture and the kids can only wear Coca-Cola apparel and one kid wears another T-Shit to school.
William Barnard WR 121 Essay 1.2 10/18/10 Censorship in Schools: Ignoring The First Amendment Since 1980 Judy Blume, famous author of multiple “banned” books, once wrote, regarding how one feels when a piece of their work gets censored, “Chilling. It’s easy to become discouraged, to second- guess everything you write.”* Blume wrote this in the introduction of a book she edited about censorship. Blume, having experienced the feeling of having her work censored many times is an expert on this subject. Censorship in schools is bad for not only does it discourage writers, it limits what students can read, write, and most importantly, learn about. Books should not be banned in schools, because they teach valuable life lessons that students should learn before adulthood.
Collins uses his poem “The History Teacher” to show us a world where we lie to our children to protect their childlike nature. In this poem a history teacher lies to his students about historical events and trivializes these events so as not to expose the children to anything that may be bad or could corrupt there innocence. By teaching the children a fairy-tale version of history rather than the reality of it, the children fail to learn about the consequences of their actions. In doing this the teacher is promoting his students ignorance and not allowing them to learn from past mistakes; mistakes that changed the face of our history and how we view the world forever. Collins is giving us a firsthand look at how our morals can affect us, but not always in a good way.
They want a change in the education system so that children can prosper and be able to boost our declining economy. Children have always dreaded going to school because of boring classes and monotone teachers, but children are not only noticing this but so are influential adults. Robinson describes the school system as a factory forming students into what we want and banishing out the ones that do not reform into the model student. Moore agrees that the school system is suppressive when he says, “As soon as I entered high school-the public school system…I was walking the halls of a two-thousand-plus –inmate holding pen” (134). Moore felt trapped and earlier revealed that he dropped out of school sophomore year because he disliked school from first grade.