The back-to-school silly season is upon us.
From The Guardian last week:
Arthur Conan Doyle‘s first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, has been removed from reading lists in Virginia schools after a parent complained about its anti-Mormon sentiments.
The decision to pull the classic novel from sixth-grade reading lists in Albemarle County, Virginia, was made by the school board, local paper the Daily Progress reports, following a complaint from local parent Brette Stevenson, who said the novel was “our young students’ first inaccurate introduction to an American religion”. …
According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Conan Doyle’s daughter said that her father “would be the first to admit that his first Sherlock Holmes novel was full of errors about the Mormons”.
The Albemarle County school board made its decision after asking a committee to study the novel, which found that it was not “age-appropriate” for sixth graders, who are 11 to 12 years old. The ban was protested by more than 20 former students, with one teenager calling it “the best book I have read so far”.
The above link for The Salt Lake Tribune, by the way, goes to an interesting article by Vince Horiuchi on “The long history of Mormon satire”, prompted by the opening of the Broadway play, “The Book of Mormon”. Sad, dispiriting, and not at all surprising that the matter of the Conan Doyle story could not be addressed by having students read the article and discuss it in class with their teachers. No, much better to quash the matter entirely. Now there’s a capital lesson to learn when you get back to school.
Coincidentally I was reading this while listening to a repeat of Jian Ghomeshi’s interview with Kinky Friedman, which starts off with a bit of Kinky’s song, “They Ain’t Makin’ Jews Like Jesus Any More”.
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