Barbara Schmidt wrote: "There is an online article today in the March 10 edition of the San Francisco Examiner related to schools' required reading lists. It touches upon the Huck Finn controversy. "The article, titled 'School book list "too white,"' is available at: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file= /examiner/archive/191998/03/10/NEWS5767.dtl" - - - - - - - - - - According to Julian Guthrie's article in the Examiner, the San Francisco school board will soon overhaul the city's required-reading lists so that up to seven of every 10 books will be by "authors of color." Board member Steve Phillips -- who the Examiner says "was an English major in college and has always loved literature" -- co-authored the measure. "In a district that is nearly 90 percent students of color, the point of education is not to glorify Europe, but to let students see themselves in the curriculum," Phillips said. Keith Jackson, Phillip's co-author and fellow literature-lover, added, "I really see this as a way to help African American students." A third Board member, Dan Kelly, emphasized the importance of presenting what he called "works that have a broader range of cultural experiences." He noted that "Mark Twain's 'Huckleberry Finn,' for instance, has a bias against African Americans. And Chaucer's 'Canterbury Tales,' while a great work, has an economic bias. It characterizes people based on their class." The board members are on the right track, but in my opinion they don't go nearly far enough. They should read "Huckleberry Finn." If they did, they might be surprised and gratified to find that Huck himself is squarely on their side. Early in the book, when the Widow Douglas takes Huck in to be her adopted son, one of first things she does is to get out her Bible and start to "learn" Huck about "Moses and the Bulrushers." "I was in a sweat to find out all about him," Huck says. "But by and by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn't care no more about him, because I don't take no stock in dead people." I think the lesson is obvious. If "the point" of education is "to let students see themselves in the curriculum," what possible excuse could there be for requiring (presumably) living students to learn about dead people? None. If we assume that an African American student can identify only with African American characters, or an Asian student with Asians, how can we expect a living, breathing student to identify with a character who -- though perhaps through no fault of his own-- has the misfortune to be deceased? We can't. I say, get rid of all books about dead people. And just to be safe, we should get rid of books by dead people, too. This advantages of this plan become clear the more you consider it. For one, it would eliminate those irritating complaints about "political correctness run amok," since Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Booker T. Washington would hit the road along with the likes of Twain, Dickens, and Chaucer. Getting rid of dead characters would also shorten the reading lists to a much more manageable length -- perhaps even to the point where some school board members might be able to master them. Finally, my plan would have the enormous benefit of freeing up large areas of precious shelf and storage space in the school libraries. This space could then be much better used for computers, software, and multi-media systems, thus helping to beter prepare today's "information-age" students for life in the 21st Century. -- Peter Salwen - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - "In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made School Boards." -- Mark Twain