Why We Shouldn’t Ban “Ender’s Game” From AP Reading Lists

I was interested to read about a recent kerfuffle erupting over Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. A parent protested the book’s status as required reading in AP English at a junior high school in Alvin, Texas (near Houston). The parent was concerned about violence and profanity in the book.

It has been a while since I’ve read it, but I don’t recall being annoyed by the level of profanity in Ender’s Game. In contrast, I recently finished Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. This book was overly laced with profanity. One of the lead characters is Bobby Shaftoe, a rough and ready US Marine who frequently drops the F-bomb whether planting corpses with false information intended for the Nazis or killing Japanese soldiers in the Philippines. Shaftoe comes up with a cornucopia of imaginative profanity, and spews it out page after page. I just don’t recall nearly so much profanity from the Mormon author Card in Ender’s Game.

What intrigues educational gaming advocates about Ender’s Game is the vision Card painted of training and educating with games. For instance, videogames were used effectively as battle simulators to train soldiers. Battle simulators are old news nowadays, but not in 1985. Kurt Squire and Henry Jenkins noted in 2003 the prophetic value of Card’s book for educational gaming:

In Orson Scott Card’s 1985 science fiction novel Ender’s Game, the Earth is facing a life-and-death battle with invading aliens. The best and brightest young minds are gathered together and trained through a curriculum that consists almost entirely of games—both electronic and physical. Teachers play almost no overt role in the process, shaping the children’s development primarily through the recruitment of players, the design of game rules, and the construction of contested spaces. Games become the central focus of the students’ lives: they play games in classes, in their off-hours, even as part of their private contemplation. Much of the learning occurs through participation in gaming communities, as the most gifted players pass along what they have learned to the other players.

As a parent myself, and educator to boot, I can certainly empathize with parents wishing to shield their children from inappropriate material. However, I also like to read the books my kids read. We’re all active readers. There are books that express worldviews I don’t agree with, and when my children read those we talk about the role of fiction and how we can enjoy a book or a movie or a television show while disagreeing with its worldview. This holds in videogames as well.

My oldest has rediscovered Oblivion on the Xbox, and has been leveling up a thief. He can sneak into a town and steal the shirt off a guard’s back and get away with it. But, we’ve discussed how thievery is not what we’re about in RL. I remind the kids of the time one of them walked out of the nearby country store with a pack of gum without paying. When I discovered it, we drove back to the store and paid for the gum. We are not thieves; it’s part of our morals, part of our worldview. However, leveling a thief in Oblivion, a fictional environment, is okay just as reading about a character who is a thief is also okay.

And so it goes. While I empathize with a parent wanting to monitor the fiction their child reads, I can’t agree with banning Ender’s Game from an AP reading list. The violence in the book involves killing enemy space aliens, and I don’t recall it being gratuitous or overly bloody. Battle scenes are common in many books for young people, including the Narnia series and Tolkein’s Middle Earth tales.

Finally, I was interested to find out the book is required reading for Marine privates wishing to level up to corporal. According to the Marine spokesman quoted in the news article, the book is about leadership in combat; therefore, the Marine Corps says aspiring corporals should read it. I’m sure Bobby Shaftoe would approve.

References:
Jenkins, H., & Squire, K. (2003) Harnessing the power of games in education. Insight, 3, 5-33.

Tompkins, J. (2008, June 15). Alvin ISD mother protests novel. The Facts. [Online]. Available: http://www.thefacts.com/story.lasso?ewcd=b56d920d8eb0be82