Trust me, your Asian students have put up with this sort of nonsense from people already. You do not need to show a cartoon image of an Asian man with “slanty eyes” to teach racism to your multicultural students. If you, white teacher, are planning to use racist imagery to teach primary school children about racism, then stop teaching immediately. I’m going to try not to swear in the rest of this post, but I feel this warranted an f-bomb. Why the everloving FUCK would you want to? You still can teach If I Ran The Zoo if you really want. Who wants to read Judges 19 to their kids? No one teaches that. (The Bible, however, is heavily edited for children. What if I want to teach my kids about racism? I will need this book to show them the racial imagery!ġ: It’s not banned. What would be banned next, one teacher lamented. Highly agitated by the decision to stop publishing a half dozen books that nobody ever recommended in the “what should I read to my students next?” conversations, they ranted in the comments about the “fun police” and how the “ world has gone bonkers”. This nuance was too complex for a few Seuss stalwarts. No one’s going to come and growl you for owning them. And the old copies of the out-of-print books aren’t going anywhere. We’ve still got 90% of his work available for purchase. Seems simple, right? Dr Seuss wrote over 60 books. The six Dr Seuss books that will not be published in future Dr Seuss’s early work contains a lot of racism, which was acknowledged by none other than Dr Seuss himself, when he went back to make edits to the wording and illustrations in at least one of his works. The news? That Dr Seuss’s estate had chosen to cease publication of six of his early works, citing racial imagery that they considered “hurtful and wrong”. This was really evident last week in a discussion about Dr Seuss. In amongst the amazing resources, good conversation and admittedly repetitive book recommendations, there exists a reactionary aspect that I find super depressing. I lose a bit of faith in my profession occasionally when I go on the NZ Primary Teachers Facebook group. We work hard, we love our students, and we continually strive to improve our practice and get better. Most of the time, I’m very proud to be a primary school teacher in New Zealand. Louise Drummond has a message for teachers who are upset that a handful of lesser-known Dr Seuss books are going out of print: get a grip.

Horton Hears a Who! by Dr. Seuss