You would think a professor would be smart enough to understand bans don’t work. They simply draw attention to subject matter that the would be banner(s) want buried. But no, Wesley “Scrotum” Scroggins wants books he finds distasteful banned.
Wesley Scroggins, a business school professor at Missouri State University, wrote an editorial for Gannett’s News-Leader condemning the teaching of Kurt Vonnegut’sSlaughterhouse-Five in Republic, MO curriculum. He said that the Vonnegut novel (considered one of the best novels of the twentieth century and widely taught in schools across the English-speaking world) contained too much cussing for children. He also condemned Sarah Ockler’s Twenty Boy Summer, a book about a girl who experiments with sex during summer holidays because it contained sex.
In response, the Republic school board has banned Slaughterhouse-Five and Twenty Boy Summer, removing them from both its classrooms and school libraries. Scroggins is disappointed that they didn’t ban another book, Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak.
Scroggins’s research specializes in international business and entrepreneurship (he teaches dull intro to management classes, apparently without much flair), and given those specialties, you’d think that he’d realize that, in most of the world, the material in all three of the books he’s picked on wouldn’t raise an eyebrow. It’s also bizarre to see someone who worships entrepreneurship simultaneously embrace a color-inside-the-lines, nothing-objectionable-allowed approach to education: Scroggins apparently wants to raise a generation of local children who never meet a challenging idea or experience an uncomfortable discussion. As an actual entrepreneur (and not just someone who researches entrepreneurship), I’m here to tell you that this is not how you teach people the imagination and creativity necessary to the process.
I find it embarrassing to be a citizen of a country with morons masquerading as people intelligent enough to teach college students. Information is not something that can be kept under wraps, nor should it be. If a thing is important, people will absorb it and pass it on. Suck on that in your tiny backwards empire of Republic, Scroggins.