Tales of a Fourth Grade Book Banning
2007-02-17

From the Sunday NY Times comes this sad story. The word “scrotum” does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children’s literature, for that matter. Yet there it is on the first page of “The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature. The inclusion of the word has shocked some school librarians, who have pledged to ban the book from elementary schools, and reopened the debate over what constitutes acceptable content in children’s books. It's always sad to see librarians wanting to "ban" anything, but it's especially sad when it's a Newbery winner that uses not slang or vulgarity but an accurate word representing a part of the human male anatomy. But hey, really, fourth graders shouldn't and don't know anything about gender differences or body parts or sex or... (EDIT: and if you think I'm serious then I have this bridge for real cheap...). And then the writer goes on to say: If it were any other novel, it probably would have gone unnoticed, unordered and unread. But in the world of children’s books, winning a Newbery is the rough equivalent of being selected as an Oprah's Book Club title. Umm, I'm not so sure that fifty years from now people will be saying that some book was an Oprah book the same way we say books are Newbery or Caldecott winners. Perhaps the writer is overestimating Oprah's depth here?