The Menifee Union School District in Menifee, CA (south-east of L.A.) recently pulled the Merriam-Webster Dictionary off the shelves of an elementary school. Why? Because a parent thought the “oral sex” entry was too explicit.
The school district said they pulled the dictionaries but have not banned them. They are reviewing the age-apprioriateness of the dictionary before putting them back in the classrooms.
To read the LA Times story about this, click here.
Anyone have any thoughts about this? My initial reaction was that this is a bit over the top, but I also don’t have small children around. Should kids have limited access to dictionaries since they contain all words, including the “bad” ones?
This seems silly to me – what ‘s next “intercourse”? It’s only explicit, because it’s supposed to be informative – that’s why the dictionary is considered a reference book (not a what we think is ok for you to know book). Are we going to get so protective that we’ll also start banning words like war, genocide, prejudice? Why is it (things we feel the need to shield our kids from) are always limited to words that are relative to sex, not something that is genuinely disturbing -like violence? Kids are not as fragile/naive as some think – it’s always going to better to provide them with more than less -and that includes open access to definitions of certain words.
This case should (but won’t) subject complaining parents to child abuse investigations. Delusion and denial based “parenting” is abusive, whereas kids need core skills to emotionally handle exposure to public, visible discussions of law, society, and public policy issues, even if not yet mature enough to understand them fully. In addition, SIECUS and similar professional groups have well documented why anything but reality based sex ed for kids is abusive.
Any kid with access to a good library, as all students need, necessarily has access to Anna Salter’s prison policy based sexual predator resources, some with warnings that emotional issues of some sick adults can be triggered by topics or details voters and jurors in our society need to handle maturely, but many adults don’t. Every good library also has emergency medicine references, some of which content on medical intake of suspect child molestation patients and forensic documentation could be edited and republished and sold as child pornography. The only difference is context and intent.
Any person lacking that developmental knowledge and perspective is ill prepared to function as an adult in our society, in core duties as voter and juror. Such immature people are not suited to become or function as parents in this society, and should certainly not be accommodated by schools with demands to stunt education and development of kids, their own or others. Schools exist in part to mitigate the limits of those who hatch babies prior to developing the practical and life skills to be responsible parents, while helping the kids to become functional adult citizens even if parents are not.
A bit of dictionary research:
Merriam-Webster cites 1973 as the year “oral sex” was added to their Collegiate dictionary. That’s the same year APA declassified the Freudian fraud of homosexuality as a mental illness in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders).
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/oral%20sex?db=dictionary
http://tinyurl.com/yl6xvou
http://tinyurl.com/6z3rl5
The above URLs compare “oral sex” as it appears in all of 3 popular dictionaries, and “fvck” between Webster’s Unabridged and Collegiate.
On oral sex, Websters is clearer than American Heritage. Random House adds anal rim jobs and tonguing. Unabridged and Collegiate use the same definition, and reference to “CUNNILINGUS, FELLATIO”, also included.
I fault Websters for their treatment of “fvck”. In both versions, they confuse colloquial use of “obscene” when that term has a far different US legal meaning. They only show “sometimes used in the present participle as an intensive” in Unabridged, when that common form belongs in both.
Lexicographers need pressure to produce quality, accurate dictionaries, not to censor for reasons of religious bigotry or financial pressure from corrupt school boards.
Here’s the school district’s press release on this issue. They appear to have shut off email to the Superintendent, Principal, and administrative offices secretary, for this school. Menifee USD employs “library technicians”, not librarians, the latter a professional category calling for at least a Masters degree.
http://www.menifeeusd.org/files/user/1/file/100126-PressRelease-Dictionaries.pdf
Given our 1st Amendment, the Americans should be embarrassed to draw this coverage by a major British paper:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/olivermarre/100006452/american-schools-ban-the-dictionary/