(no subject)

[tree_and_leaf]

While I'd quite like to believe this (who doesn't love a story about kids fighting for the right to read what they want?) I find it hard to believe that a Roman Catholic school* would ban some of these. I mean, admittedly you might censor Paradise Lost, because its Christology is certainly very dubious, but getting upset about works on human evolution is more of a fundamentalist Protestant thing, and I can't imagine why any school that didn't have a Stalinist axe to grind would want to ban Animal Farm.

But.... Dante? I'm not buying it without considerably more substantiation.



* The OP doesn't specify what kind of 'strict private school' they attend, but states that "most of the books contained information that opposed Catholicism".

Comments

[coughingbear]

I first heard about this on Twitter, and someone quite quickly posted a link to a discussion about it being a hoax, on reddit. (I am using P's laptop, and for some reason the equals sign key is not working, so I can't embed a link, but if you google "catholic school locker banned hoax" it's one of the first few results.) Apparently the poster had asked for a list of banned books on Yahoo Answers just a few days before posting the locker library story - which originally went up a couple of years ago, and has been reposted several times since.

So yes, I think your instincts are wholly correct and it is a deeply implausible list/story. Even Antonia White's convent in Frost in May didn't ban Dante, though the play version was somewhat bowdlerised version, IIRC.