December 12, 2015
AP Photo/.
Author Samuel Longhorne Clemens, better known under his pen name, Mark Twain, is seen in this undated photo.
A Montgomery County high school has removed The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from its English classes, citing the book's frequent use of a racial slur.
According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Friends' Central School has taken Mark Twain's classic, which follows a boy who escapes an abusive father and goes on an adventure down the Mississippi River with an escaped slave, out of its curriculum because of its frequent use of the N-Word. More from the Inquirer:
After a forum for students and faculty, the administration of Friends' Central School decided to strike the book from the 11th-grade American literature class, principal Art Hall said in a letter to parents this week.
"We have all come to the conclusion that the community costs of reading this book in 11th grade outweigh the literary benefits," Hall said in his letter.
The book's use of the N-word was challenging for some students, who felt the school was not being inclusive, Hall said this week.
The Quaker school's decision follows a national controversy over the book's use of the word, which led to some schools across the county pulling it from their classes and using a new edition that replaced the N-word with "slave."
It was originally criticized after its 1885 release for almost the opposite reasons: its portrayal of a black man befriending a white boy and its perceived disrespect for religion and authority.
Some have argued it's important to teach the book despite its use of the N-word, which is in the text 219 times, claiming removing it from classrooms is censorship.
School officials told the Inquirer they didn't believe they were censoring and instead were teaching an important lesson about the use of language.
