Dangerous Words: Censorship in Public Schools
This essay discusses the problems raised by book challenges in the public schools and offers practical and philosophical responses to censorship. It also summarizes the legal history of book censorship in schools and libraries and provides a list of often challenged books that should be used in the classroom. We cannot protect our children from this world, which is a scary place. The only thing we can do is help them develop an inner strength to meet the inevitable challenges they will face. —Young Adult Novelist Katherine Paterson, Foerstal Interview, pp. 168-69. Imagine you are a new ninth-grade language arts teacher, fresh out of college, filled with big ideas, and inspired by the large number and wide variety of books for young adults. You assign your class a novel by well-known (and critically-acclaimed) young adult author Chris Crutcher, and everything seems to be going well. The students appear to like the book, the class discussions are lively, and you are certain you are teaching them about reading, interpretation, and argument. Best of all, students actually seem to be enjoying themselves. Then your principal calls you into her office, closes the door, and tells you there’s been a complaint by one of the parents—
Homecoming
Abstract Philosophical and literary perspectives are combined with psychoanalytic ones in an attempt to provide a comprehensive conceptualization of the theme of homecoming. The concepts of home and homecoming are presented as symbolic representations of fundamental psychical functions, and their vicissitudes as subjective manifestations of basic psychic organizations. The hypothesis is put forward that the ability, or lack thereof, to work through the process of mourning of a lost object colors the evolution and outcome of any reckoning with such a notion and what it stands for. Literary sources are used to supplement and explicate psychoanalytic understandings regarding how the concept of homecoming is being made use of, within unconscious dynamics observed in a number of analytic cases.
The American Political System
The American Political System focuses on the core insights of political science that students need to understand American government. Each chapter is organized around the real-world puzzles that draw scholars and students alike to study American politics and provides a clear, consistent framework for thinking analytically about these questions.