Discovered via this MetaFilter post: “National Conservative Weekly” Human Events Online has put together a list of The Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. I’m sure you can readily imagine some candidates that conservatives would dislike: of course Marx is going to be on there, et cetera, et cetera, and yeah, we know what to expect.
But.
But.
Coming of Age in Samoa?
The Kinsey Report?
John Dewey’s Democracy and Education?
What the hell is wrong with these people? To paraphrase re6smith: one has to wonder about an ideology that, in a supposedly free-thinking democracy, can declare books harmful or dangerous. Or, more to the point, taz’s comment: “This is a good beginning. Now, does anyone know where I can find ‘The Ten Most Harmful Musical Compositions’ and ‘The Ten Most Harmful Works of Art’ of the 19th and 20th Centuries?”
Isn’t it great that they link each title to amazon.com? These books may be harmful, but that shouldn’t get in the way of commerce, for goodness sake.
And my pet peeve: anyone who says Dewey advocates teaching isolated “skills” hasn’t read Dewey. Progressive education needs good critique, but I’m so tired of this conservative misrepresentation of progressives.
I think there’s a whole lot of misrepresentation going on in the descriptions on that list. I mean, the comments on Keynes are just downright stupid, never mind conservative economist Milton Friedman’s famous declaration that “we are all Keynesians now,” or the fact that the recent Chair of Economic Advisors in George W.’s not-very-liberal administration is a neo-Keynesian, or the fact that the federal debt that the blurb indicts doubled under Reagan’s rejection of Keynesian policies for supply-side voodoo economics.
It would seem, as well, that the fifteen judges — comprising fourteen men and Phyllis Schlafly — are rather afraid of issues of gender and sexuality.
I like your idea for a Scary Books course. What happens, though, when you try to move the concept of “scariness” away from the ideological silliness these folks commit? Is such a thing possible, or are the ultra-conservative would-be “values” dictators the only ones who see books as scary? How would you feel about having students read The Turner Diaries or doing rhetorical analyses of http://www.resist.com or http://www.stormfront.org (please note who I’m linking to here, and who I’m not linking to) — or even reading some of the more gruesomely misogynistic portions of American Psycho (warning: really ugly prose description)?
Good questions about how I would feel about having students read books that would seem scary to me. Part of me thinks, well, of course I would want them to read books that a leftist feminist would find scary: need to know what the other side thinks and to understand how those ideas circulate. The other part of me is, well, scared by the thought.
And “The Feminine Mystique” as harmful? Good lord what were these people thinking? It did far more good (raising conciousness) than it did harm (stigmatizing housewives).
Well, it’s pretty clear where these fourteen men and Phyllis want women to stay. But yeah, I totally agree.
On the other hand, I did a little poking around, and it looks as if there are a good number of people who agree that Mead’s first book was considerably more problematic than the excerpts I vaguely remember from my 101 course — although I’m betting that their reasons are very different from these judges’.