Under DeSantis's guidelines, Florida schools are removing texts by John Milton and Toni Morrison and restricting Shakespeare

Book ban in an Orlando-area Florida school system, as over 150 books, including classics, are removed due to sexual content.

on Jul 06, 2023

Under DeSantis's guidelines, Florida schools are removing texts by John Milton and Toni Morrison and restricting Shakespeare | Frontlist

A teacher claims that over 100 books have been removed from school shelves.

Over 150 books have been taken from a large Orlando-area Florida school system, including classics such as The Scarlet Letter, Paradise Lost, and The Invisible Man, as school administrators assess works for sexual content in accordance with the state's stringent book ban rules.

According to a teacher who keeps track of books temporarily pulled for review by the Orange County government, titles by Shakespeare have been restricted to only 10th through 12th graders, while other popular works such as The Fault in Our Stars, Into the Wild, and Catch-22 have been placed on the restricted list due to sexual content.

One teacher told The Orlando Sentinel that she was "gobsmacked" when she discovered Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream was among the prohibited titles.

She stated that she selects works to study in class "to engage my students, to offer them literature that makes them think," and that a realistic depiction of "the adolescent experience" in literature may contain certain sexual themes while remaining appropriate for the classroom.

"It's just so frustrating and disheartening," she expressed.

The state's book restriction legislation, enacted by Republican governor Ron DeSantis, have resulted in bare shelves throughout Florida.

"The books are sitting out on tables, they're being boxed up and discarded," Florida school librarian Keri Clark told The Independent earlier this year. "It's just a very sad sight."

Many of the youngsters keep gazing through the window, and it's terrible that I can't let them in to get books."

The policymakers in Florida are part of a nationwide trend of book bans.

According to PEN America, school administrators attempted to restrict at least 874 individual book titles during the first half of the 2022-2023 school year, a roughly 30% increase from the previous year's book challenges.

According to PEN, the majority of book ban attempts targeted works by and about people of color and LGBT+ persons. At least 30% of the impacted titles deal with race, racism, or include characters of color, while more than a quarter of the titles have LGBT+ characters or themes.