Northville, MI – Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl is required reading in many schools, and one mother has filed a formal complaint over it.
Gail Horalek has filed a formal complaint against her daughter’s school district over the Anne Frank book, over passages that she believes are too graphic for seventh graders.
The unedited version of the diary, which was published in 1996, describes Frank’s discovery of her own genitalia in some detail, which Horalek considers “pornographic.”
She believes that the Meads Mill Middle School where her daughter attends should have asked parents for permission before assigning the book.
“The problem is the school is giving the seventh graders inappropriate material and not explaining it to the parents,” she told the Northville Patch .
She said that the school usually sends a permission slip home for books and films that contain inappropriate material.
“If they watch any kind of movie with a swear word in it, I have to sign a permission slip,” Horalek said.
Horalek also said that the other parents were unaware of the passages. She only discovered them when her daughter confessed that the book had made her uncomfortable.
She now wants the book removed from the curriculum. “It doesn’t mean my child is sheltered, it doesn’t mean I live in a bubble and it doesn’t mean I’m trying to ban books,” she said. She just thinks that such graphic details “aren’t necessary to grasp the devastation of the holocaust.”
This isn’t the first time Anne Frank’s diary has raised controversy . In 2010, Culpeper County public school in Virginia stopped assigning the uncensored version of the tome due to extra passages that detail Frank’s own emerging sexual desires and “unflattering descriptions of her mother and other people living together.”
What do you think? Should schools only assign the abridged version of Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl?
