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I imagine that many parents of teenagers may envision their kids’ school classrooms as refuges from the hormones that hurtle through the hallways outside. Students may watch racy movies, enjoy soft-porn music videos, and post revealing photos on Instagram, but for the time he or she has their attention, the teacher acts as the surrogate guardian of virtue. Parents may balk at the prospect of their 16-year-olds, seemingly only a few years removed from Legos and stuffed animals, talking about relationships, abuse, and body image with a mysterious adult who shook their hand at Back to School Night. The classroom should be one place where teenagers are forced to have something besides sex on the brain.
I understand why parents want to protect their children, but a properly contextualized conversation about sex in literature class might be the best protection they can hope for.
Last year, a North Carolina school board nearly banned Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits from high schools in its district. In the book, budding land baron Esteban Trueba rapes peasant women and abandons the children they bear. In the warped world of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, another novelfrequently targeted for banning, children dodge pedophiles and suffer horrific sexual abuse.
