Last week the Duval County Public School system received a petition from nine concerned citizens to ban two books from the third-grade reading list: “Nasreen’s Secret School” and “The Librarian of Basra”, both of which are said to be based off true Middle East stories.
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A petition has now been launched which seeks to ban the books at New Berlin Elementary School, in Duval County, Florida.
Parents are anxious that books talking about conflict are too hard for elementary school children to understand and that some of the books promote worshiping a non-Christian god.
The Facebook post that prompted the petition drive asks: “If we cannot promote praying to God and Jesus Christ in our public schools, how can we promote reading the Koran and praying to Muhammad?”
Superintendent Nikolai Vitti said banning books sets a bad precedent.
Nasreen’s Secret School portrays an Afghan girl who is sent by her grandmother to a secret school for girls, while The Librarian of Basra, inspired by a 2003 New York Times story, is about the person who saved parts of the Basra library’s collection before the building was on fire following the British forces’ occupation of the southeastern Iraqi city.
“We are a military town”.
The parents recently petitioned the school district to remove the two books.
“If you want to take it out of the library, you want to take it out of the classroom, it’s not “my school”, it’s “our school” and there could very well be parents and children who are eager to read about contemporary issues”, Jenkins said.
The books were recently adopted as part of the district’s curriculum and are distributed to students online. Review journal The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books said that Nasreen’s Secret School makes the situation in Afghanistan “accessible”.
Dianne Haines Roberts, a grandparent of a school pupil, warned that children at that age were very impressionable. She sees the resistance as an unwillingness to embrace a different culture.
“I don’t think they need to know the horrors of the world.”
Those on both sides agreed that there are relatively few direct references to religion in the book.
I agree with the superintendent; once parents are allowed to ban specific titles, even more books will be questioned.
But in the end, the idea that the debate is over removing books that deal with saving books isn’t lost on Vitti.
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“Ironically, it’s the same themes that are discussed in the books themselves.”
