By Valerie Stivers, UnHerd. (Photo: Isfak Himu/Unsplash)
The required summer reading for rising ninth graders at my son’s public high school in Brooklyn this year is a choice of the following: Unwind, a work of dystopian science-fiction by bestselling young-adult author Neal Shusterman; The Epic Crush of Genie Lo, a fantasy YA novel by F.C. Yee; and Punching the Air, a National Book Award finalist novel in verse, also YA, co-written by Ibi Zoboi, a Haitian-American author, and Yusef Salaam, a New York City councilman and one of the “Central Park Five”.
The choice of ephemeral, ideological, and genre fiction in the YA category for study in school isn’t rare. It plagued both of my kids throughout their private middle-school educations. And it’s shutting down debate and turning kids away from authentic learning.
When my daughter started at a different New York City public school three years ago, the entire incoming freshman class was assigned a piece of transgender agitprop for young adults titled The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime that Changed Their Lives. This book manipulatively told kids that their acceptance of transgender ideology was the key to preventing horrific crimes. Later that year, she was tasked with making serious exegesis on the differences between the Ursula K. Le Guin story “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” and a rejoinder by woke fantasy writer N.K. Jemsin. As if a dystopia designed to prove a particular point provides meaningful evidence on human societies.