School sticks to its guns on top book
Mum says best-seller unsuitable for kids, but...
A literary-minded city school has hotly defended its decision to buy a best-selling novel containing four-letter words for every single one of its pupils.
Walton High head Michelle Currie insists 'The Curious Incident of The Dog In The Night-time' by Mark Haddon is an exceptional book guaranteed to help students both educationally and socially.
Critics, and the public, agree with her. The novel, a first person narrative of a boy with Asperger's Syndrome – a form of autism – has already won three top awards.
But this week one local mother disagreed: "I have never read such filth," she stormed. "I looked at this book and found 14 pages on which there was the 'f' word and even one with the 'c' word.
"I cannot believe that this is the kind of book the school would encourage my child to bring home. It is disgraceful," added the mother, who admitted she had not read the entire book.
Said Mrs Currie: "I disagree. This is a brilliantly written novel. There is some bad language but we took this into account when evaluating whether students would benefit from the experience of reading the book."
She said the swear words were specifically to demonstrate how highly literal Asperger's youngsters often cannot recognise that certain actions or words are inappropriate.
"But the book also shows how people with Asperger's can be highly talented – in this case in maths and science. We felt this is not only educational for our students but also provides them with an insight into how people can be different, but still clever."
This message was deemed to be so important that the book was chosen for the Leading Edge project, where pupils from three schools all read the same piece of literature to compare ideas and take part in
internet discussion forums.
"The project used government grant money to buy 2,000 copies of the book. We gave one to every pupil and every member of staff.
"As far as I know there has only been this one complaint," she said.
Email to a friend
Print this page
Looking for...
Featured advertisers
Jobs
Search for a job
Motors
Search for a car
Property
Search for a house
Weather for Milton Keynes
Thursday 09 February 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: -0 C to 2 C
Wind Speed: 6 mph
Wind direction: South west
Tomorrow
Cloudy
Temperature: -4 C to 2 C
Wind Speed: 14 mph
Wind direction: South east
