Banning the classics is a ‘pretty serious problem’

I recently became aware of the Mat-Su School Board’s decision to ban “Catch-22,” “The Great Gatsby” and other books dealing with what one board member called “pretty serious problems.”

Forget “Catch-22” for a second — look at our most durable classics: “Hamlet,” “Don Quixote,” the Divine Comedy, the Iliad, the Bible. Are these offensive books? Without a doubt. They remain powerful precisely because reading them moves — perhaps unsettles — perhaps even wounds us. These books, full of “pretty serious problems,” continue to resonate because life also is a pretty serious problem. Imagine banning the Bible because of its copious bloodletting — because the crucifixion is too violent. I’m sure you see that this would be a big mistake, even if you don’t quite see why.

Look: any child with a smartphone has immediate access to everything from niche pornography to videos of people being murdered. This is the ugly fact. To think that you’re protecting kids from anything by keeping them away from a 95-year-old novel about Long Island socialites is a delusion. By the end of high school, children have left the walled garden. The question is whether they will have read the great literature that could have helped prepare them to encounter life’s pretty serious problems when they arise.

I hope you will reconsider your views or, at least, surrender to public pressure.

Zachary Snowdon Smith

Cordova