Not only the Biff, Chip and Kipper books - specifically The Blue Eye issue. An independent reviewer, Ash Ahmad, a ‘diversity, equity, inclusion and wellbeing consultant’, found the book ‘inappropriate’ and, of course, OUP decided to pulp all copies. Well, at least they didn’t burn them like the Nazis did to books they didn’t like.
Other books aimed at children’s education as well, including:
If I Ran the Zoo (Dr Seuss)
Dr Dolittle (Hugh Lofting)
Noddy (Enid Blyton)
and even the Cambridge Latin Course text books
have been blacklisted or cancelled
I suppose that this simply reflects our changing society in this country.
No, it’s a different series of children’s books: ‘Biff, Chip and Kipper’.
I have never read them - perhaps after my time - but from what I read in the Telegraph article they are completely innocent in their intent… like Noddy, for example.
I fear that there are moves afoot to change our country into a different one in which most of us will eventually feel uneasy or even unsafe.
I already feel uneasy and unsafe, I keep worrying im going to get locked up for thinking. Thinking what I hear you say? I darent think it so I darent say it!
My local high street has men wearing turbans and the women wearing hijabs, or is it the other way around? We are all genderly challenged in 2022. Pah! Think I’m scared ! Help
“Book burning” has a ring of protest about it - a decision not to use a particular book in school lessons anymore seems quite different - a more considered approach and much less dramatic than “book burning” to me.
Out of a series of 220 books, one book in the series has been dropped because feedback from teachers and parents has been that the story is inappropriate so the publishers have taken it out of print.
There is still all the rest of the Biff, Chip and Kipper series to use to teach young children to read and if this particular book is not going to be used anymore, it makes sense to get rid of the remaining copies of that one title that is no longer recommended reading for youngsters.
I have never heard of this book series - the series didn’t begin to be published until the 1980s - my generation and my kids generation survived before these books were written and I’m sure future generations will survive if one book is taken out of this series.
After seeing some of the narrative from that particular book, I’m surprised it was published in the first place, as recently as 2001, to be honest.
With all the thousands of early reader books there are, I don’t see why people would make a fuss if teachers decide to drop one book from the school books lists - they can’t keep every book that children have ever read on the list of books for schools, so why not drop them if teachers are no longer wanting to use them in classrooms?
I know that quite a few of the books I remember from childhood are out of print now.
I remember in my last year of primary school, our class teacher asked a few of us to help to sort out his book cupboards and take out all the books with ten different titles and put them into boxes - they were being ear-marked for destruction because the school had dropped them from the list of school teaching books, to make room for some more recently published teaching books.
One of the titles from the Junior English Series of 10 Book Titles was called Poems of Adventure and it contained some of my favourite poems, so I begged my teacher to let me keep a copy from the pile that was destined for destruction.
I still have that book.
