The hardest thing about teaching, and teaching middle school especially, is all the stuff you can’t cover with students on the fragile border between childhood and young adulthood. You can’t do it all, and you shouldn’t try. The mark of a good teacher is that she cuts the right amount of difficult detail from a lesson, saving the most appropriate and comprehensible complications—and then leaving just enough unanswered to draw a curious child back from daydreaming.
But as seen in one southern Mississippi school district’s recent decision to spare eighth graders the discomfort of Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, cutting too much of the complicated stuff also defeats the purpose of school.
Biloxi Public Schools decided to remove To Kill A Mockingbird from the district-wide eighth grade English curriculum last week. Because Harper Lee’s iconic, Alabama-set 1960 novel of racial reckoning and moral coming of age—for both the Jim Crow South, and narrator Scout—holds us fallen souls to a moral standard not worth the strain of historical dissonance.
Lee’s dialogue reproduces 1930s dialect, racial slurs and all. It’s a tricky one to teach, worse to read aloud. In 2004, a student in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, wore a t-shirt on which he’d written words that appeared in the the book: Every line he deemed derogatory, “If it’s good enough for the book, it’s good enough for the shirt,” he argued. Biloxi’s school board, receiving complaints, may have preempted a similarly newsworthy protest in removing the book from its required reading—and joined the long and ignoble tradition of Mockingbird censorship. While its 20th-century censors opposed too raw a social critique, its 21st-century censors would rather spare their students and themselves the moral unease of their historical legacy.
Kenny Holloway, the vice president of the Biloxi school board, told the Sun Herald that the district chose to shelve Mockingbird after complaints about “some language in the book that made people uncomfortable.” The themes of the current curricular unit in English and language arts at Biloxi’s middle schools—“the Golden Rule” and “taking a stand,” the Herald reported—might have been built around Mockingbird. But, Holloway said, “We can teach the same themes with other books.”
A sunnier story would better serve the unit’s essential idea, “Compassion and empathy are not dependent upon race or education.” In Mockingbird, fellow-feeling almost never breaks all the way through these barriers. Overt racism belongs to “ignorant and trashy” people, Atticus Finch tells Scout when she asks about their neighbors’ calling her father a “n*****-lover.” Picture the prompt on the chalkboard: “Is loving our neighbors as ourselves a luxury?” Eighth graders, a reliably opinionated people, won’t shrink from the uncomfortable discussion to follow. And their reading will include a hateful word, but not new one. Its common 1930s-era use won’t be a corrupting revelation.
True discomfort lurks in the historical context the book conjures: No word, no matter how noxious, can unsettle a soul so lastingly as the damnable doctrine that thrived in Biloxi two vivid generations ago. The local coastline bears an historical marker to remember the events of “Bloody Sunday”—when a white mob attacked black protesters who’d waded into the “whites only” waters of a segregated Biloxi beach on April 24, 1960. It took eight years and a court ruling in 1968 for Mississippi beaches to desegregate. The state’s public schools didn’t follow suit until 1969, when the Supreme Court turned up the heat from Brown v. Board of Education to make immediate desegregation the law of land.
Andy Mullins considers Mississippi’s uncomfortable remembering an educator’s mission. He’s a teacher of teachers, director of the Mississippi Teacher Corps—and as a long-serving administrator at Ole Miss, he oversaw its campaign to install “contextualization plaques” lest future generations forget their campus was, not so long ago, a racial battleground. Though he’s heard of Huck Finn being censored for its use of the n-word, “This is my first encounter with attempts to remove Mockingbird,” Mullins tells me. Biloxi Public Schools’ decision, he says, is disappointing: “They made a mistake.”
Biloxi could have defended its curricular goals, and lived up to its prescribed lessons by taking a stand for the inevitable unease of actual learning. “Students need to learn this history—because it’s uncomfortable, not in spite of it. They used that word back then.” It’s not just important for young Mississippians to learn, but “All the southern states, all the states period. Sticking up for what’s right and respecting your fellow human beings, they’re timeless lessons”—lesson undiminished, in other words, by a few decades’ progress.
“I’m going to talk to my teachers about it and hear what they think,” he adds—meaning his second-year trainees in the Mississippi Teacher Corps. “All of them work in districts north of Jackson, with huge majority of their students African American.” It promises to be a richly uncomfortable discussion.
