Of Mice and Men taken off Wales' GCSE syllabus because of racial slurs - Wales Online
Of Mice and Men taken off Wales' GCSE syllabus because of racial slurs - Wales Online
John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men captures a universal themes and a time in history in a powerful, short text
Another failure of anyone with any kind of responsibility to have a spine
The book is explicitly anti racist. It's depicting racism in a negative light. It's pretty progressive for something written in the '30s if anything.
What will we do with all the copies of the books already in schools?
The English teachers will have to take them out the back and shoot them.
"tend the rabbits"
The book hasn't been banned, it's just not been selected as a required or optional text in a new English qualification for Welsh schools. Steinbeck is a wonderful author and story-teller, and his stories provide a useful insight into America's difficult recent past in regards to racial segregation (as well as other issues such as oppression of the poor). America is an important country, and it's useful to understand why it remains such a damaged society with deep racial divides even today, but it's not Wales is it.
Hiding that racial slurs exist isn't a way to stop racism.
After reading the article, I still think these books are important, but it made it seem they were reading these books out in the class like we did with harry potter and stuff.
I'd say these books are important for anyone studying American literature - and probably essential for anyone studying American literature of the 20th Century.
They're not so important for Welsh pupils and don't need to be included in a general English literature syllabus for 15-year-olds in the UK. The reasoning outlined in the article for choosing not to include these sorts of works in the list of required and optional texts for this specific qualification is pretty convincing IMO and I completely support it.
No books are being banned from schools or anything like that. The article headline is I suspect just trying to get clicks from the anti-woke crowd.