Hanover's Nineteen Minutes Mistake

Censorship is no solution. Education, prevention, and postvention are. I have written very specifically in The Copycat Effect that censorship and silence are not the right choices.

Dartmouth College is located in Hanover. The illusion is that the community is totally enlightened, and perceived so by the summer tourists, students' parents, and the ski crowd that come to town for good meals or nice hotels when the ski condo feels too cramped. But the "town versus gown" reality has raised its ugly head once again in this New Hampshire village. Hanover tends to be a conservative location. Recent news from there only goes to reinforce this.

As reported this week by the Associated Press, a best-selling author’s novel about a school shooting has been removed from a reading list.

Jodi Picoult's Nineteen Minutes won't even be published until March 6. Students at Hanover High School were among three schools in New Hampshire and Massachusetts given advance copies to study. In the novel, an ostracized teen living in Sterling, N.H. – a wealthy, Upper Valley college town on the Vermont border – goes on a school shooting rampage, killing 10 people in 19 minutes.

Hanover High Principal Deb Gillespie announced in an e-mail last week to parents that teachers would stop teaching the book, the Valley News reported. Students can continue studying Nineteen Minutes” on their own so long as they discuss their progress regularly with teachers. Gillespie said she doesn’t believe the book would inspire a shooting at the school, but said the fictional shooting date, March 6, 2007, might make some students afraid to attend school that day....

Picoult said in one class, Nineteen Minutes was being taught alongside James Dickey's Deliverance, which depicts sodomy and violence, Vladimir Nabokov's child-sex novel Lolita, and Anthony Burgess' violent The Clockwork Orange.

“I don’t know really what makes ‘Lolita’ any less disturbing than Nineteen Minutes, ” she said. - - Beverley Wang, reporter, The Associated Press

This move by the high school officials in Hanover is misguided and ill-advised. Removing Jodi Picoult's Nineteen Minutes from the Hanover High School reading list is a big mistake that could backfire and an educational opportunity missed.