[Richard Meyer]

Some Questions:

1) How many people looking in here at this discussion are or were teachers? How many ever taught Huck Finn? Did teaching the novel and its use of the word nigger present major or difficult issues during its reading and study?

2) How many people looking in here read Huck Finn when they were in high school? Was it a problem then?

3) For schools that choose to use the new, revised Huck Finn, will the instructor tell the students that the word nigger has been replaced by the word slave? Or will the "improvement" be kept a secret?

Some Comments:

I find it rather stunning that Mr. Gwynn says he "can't teach it any longer." The article in The Book Haven link goes on to quote him further: "Maybe if I were a better (or younger) teacher I could use this book to challenge all kinds of assumptions about language and art. I just don’t find myself up to the fight anymore, at least at the sophomore level."

What are we to make of this rationale? Should a major work in the literary canon be dropped because the teacher's age and ability aren't up to the task? That's part of Mr. Gwynn's explanation, and it's hardly a sound argument for booting a book from the curriculum.

During the three decades plus that I spent in the high school classroom, Huck Finn was taught at either the sophomore or junior level. I've experienced it being taught to classes of all white students and to classes of racially and culturally diverse students. In my experience, the use of the word nigger in the book never presented a problem, either in my classroom or the classrooms of my colleagues. I will tell you what I did notice as a problem. Increasingly over the years, more and more students would complain that the book was too hard to read, that it was too hard for them to understand the funny way Huck and Jim were talking.

I also find it quite shocking that Mr. Gwynn says it just doesn't work anymore to teach the book to sophomores. College sophomores! Are we at the point where a second year student in a college or university can't read or handle Huck Finn? Perhaps the problem, then, is with those students and not the book. How many times have those students likely heard and used the word nigger before they ever knew of Mark Twain or Huck Finn? Good Lord, year after year I taught Aristophanes' play Lysistrata (unexpurgated) to my high school seniors in humanities class. And we have university students who can't handle Mark Twain?

As far as I'm concerned, this entire flap says more about the declining state of American education than it does about Mark Twain and his book.

Richard