The Prize-winning novel by Harper Lee’s Pulitzer , “To Kill a Mockingbird,” has been removed from a Mississippi school district lesson plan – all because the book’s language made some people feel uneasy.
School district pulls ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ from reading list; ‘makes people uncomfortable,’ official says https://t.co/l5yIKIi1Ux pic.twitter.com/usLg3SZWov
— AL.com (@aldotcom) October 13, 2017
Harper Lee
Image credit: foxnews.com
“The Biloxi School District Administrators announced this week they were pulling the novel from the 8th-grade curriculum, saying they received complaints that some of the book’s language “makes people uncomfortable.”
The Sun Herald reported that the book was pulled from the lesson plan because the novel contained “the N word.”
A message displayed on the school’s website says “To Kill A Mockingbird” teaches students that compassion and empathy do not depend upon race or education.
The School board vice president, Kenny Holloway says other books can teach the same lessons.
A coastal Mississippi school has pulled “To Kill a Mockingbird” from its curriculum https://t.co/7DwpWy9vDl pic.twitter.com/36GfbAOCK3
— Sun Herald (@sunherald) October 12, 2017
However, the book will still be found in Biloxi school libraries.
The novel, which was published in 1960, chronicled the adventures of Jean Louise Finch aka Scout and her brother Jeremy aka Jem and the racial inequality that existed in their small Alabama town. The book was followed by a court case their father, Atticus, was involved in.
In the storyline, Atticus defended Tom Robinson, who is a black man who was accused of raping Mayella Ewell, a young white woman. Despite strong evidence of Robinson’s innocence, he was found guilty of raping Ewell.
The book was later adapted into a movie in 1962, starring Gregory Peck, who won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Atticus Finch.
The Sun Herald reported that the novel was listed at No. 21 on the American Library Association’s most “banned or challenged books list in the last decade.”
Obesity In Children And Teens At All Time High
With the abundance of fast food chain restaurants in every country, and the easy access to a quick, cheap meal, it comes as no shock that the number of obese children and adolescents is at an all-time high compared to a couple of decades ago.
Ten times as high to be exact!
The United States of America, some Caribbean countries like Puerto Rico, as well as Middle Eastern countries such as Kuwait and Qatar, came up next in line with obesity levels that are over 20% for the same age group as the Pacific Islands.
Credit: CNN
Majid Ezzati, who led the research and is a professor of global environmental health the Imperial College London in the United Kingdom stated that over the past 4 decades, the rates of obesity in children as well as adolescents have risen dramatically and are continuing to do so in low and middle income countries. In high-income countries, obesity has plateaued and evened out but is still at an unacceptably high rate. Majid Ezzati also stated that children nowadays start gaining weight at around the age of 5, unlike children of two generation past.
Credit: CNN
James Bentham, who is a statistician at the University of Kent and co-authored the paper, stated that obesity rates in children and adolescents are accelerating around South, East and Southeast Asia, and are still rising in other low and middle income countries.
While the average body mass index among adolescents and children has recently evened out in North America and Europe, it is still dangerous to be complacent as over one in five young individuals in the US is obese, and one in ten in the UK is obese. Obesity as a child carries over a likelihood of obesity as an adult, and this comes with many consequences and risks, including a higher risk of diabetes, some carcinomas (cancer) and cardiovascular diseases, with type 2 diabetes being a typically onset condition in adults.