What's stopping them? Nothing. I think the only reason they didn't destroy this little vestige of the New Deal era's temporary relief for the working class is there hasn't been a board room meeting (yet) to make it happen, and/or :my-hero: hasn't tweeted about how Of Mice and Men "SUCKS!" in a way that moves mountains with sheer bazinga force.
The kids will certainly prefer to do reading assignments about Tony Stark instead (or the next big thing down the pipe), the way that fast food and junk food catering replaced cafeteria kitchens in public schools everywhere around me. The "consumer choice" momentum would be unstoppable.
It's a little thing to add to the hellworld pile, but it disturbs me.
The Jungle is one of the half dozen or so things I remember from high school.
I believe that Upton Sinclair's work will also be on the chopping block. :this-is-fine:
Its incredible it hasn't been banned given the book's obvious affinity for socialism.
My middle school only read excerpts about how bad the meat was, and then how that was completely fixed by regulations. It was never covered in HS.
Oh yeah I read it later, my point is there's no reason to ban it since it's already been recuperated.
You ban a thing or remove it and a kid might realize their ignorance on the subject and do primary research or listen to someone else on the topic.
You give them white-washed caricatured versions and they walk away secure in whatever propaganda you inserted into it.
Bigger fish to fry is probably the only reason it's stuck around as long as it has.
It just takes one board room meeting or one billionaire tweet to change that.
If they were going to replace curriculum with comic books they would of done it by now.
What the kids prefer doesn’t matter, and I doubt the kids preferring fast food had an effect on that change over something like cost.
Give it time. Soda and junk food "charity" toward impoverished school districts put that stuff on the menu and pushed out everything else.
There really isn't anything to stop book replacements except that they didn't get around to it yet.
What the kids prefer doesn’t matter
It does, actually. Lifetime habits develop in formative years and if the easiest and most available food is junk food, junk food habits are normalized, which is especially bad in a closed environment such as a public school. Saying "it would have happened anyway" is both unprovable and sounds a lot like :LIB: inevitability arguments with pretenses of "let the market decide."
The more plausible thing would be that the teachers themselves don't read anything but YA novels and think TVTropes is deep media analysis, so they assign it themselves. Which we already sort of see in that YA novels are supposedly very didactic now and tuned to the hyper-normie liberal politics of the adults reading it and not the kids it's supposed to be for.
You guys read Steinbeck in HS? The only thing I remember reading that explicitly had communists was Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. There were a few glimpses of communist thought (I think) but they exist mostly to take advantage of the black guy's hope to end racism for solidifying their own power.
