Adult Education

Jerry Agar was the last guy we figured would have so much respect for The Kansas City Star.

Agar arrived in town several months ago to fill the 9-11 a.m. slot at KMBZ 980 as the lead-in to Rush Limbaugh. It follows, then, that Agar would play liberal-hatin’, God-fearin’ and U.S.A.-lovin’ wingnut to the hilt, even if he is a Canadian citizen. Given his politics, it seemed Agar would have nothing but contempt for the kind of paternalistic liberalism that permeates the metro’s major daily.

But no. It turns out Agar has high regard for the Star‘s style and sophistication.

Confused? So was this meat patty when it realized how much mileage Agar was getting out of a stunt he pulled last week.

Let’s back up. By now you’ve no doubt heard about crusadin’ Janet Harmon, the Johnson County mom who’s leading 500 cranky Blue Valley School District parents. They’ve turned in a petition demanding that the district remove 14 books from the required high school reading list, including such highly esteemed works as Ken Kesey‘s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Maya Angelou‘s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Last week, in an interview with the Star, Harmon threw down a challenge to the newspaper, which had already voiced its opposition to her project in an editorial.

If the Star really thought the books were valuable, she asked, why didn’t it print the offending passages — dirty words and all?

Agar judged this suggestion to be not idiotic but persuasive. He echoed Harmon’s challenge and even sent a letter to the Star, putting the question to the editors once again. But then, that’s the sort of clueless commentator Agar is most of the time.

See, what the radio blowhard fails to realize is that the Blue Valley reading program is aimed at 14- to 18-year-olds, budding young intellects who soon will head to college, where it pays to have some familiarity with important books.

Agar is under the impression that the Star is aimed at a similar audience. His respect and admiration for the paper are simply astounding.

But this tenderloin reads the Star often enough to know that any semiliterate with a fifth-grade education could keep up with the scribblings of the intellectual giants writing columns for the drab daily.

Just to be sure, the Strip sent an e-mail to Derek Donovan, the Star‘s “readers’ representative.” Is it true, we wondered, that the paper is written for a reader with a grade school comprehension level?

“Thanks for posing such an interesting question,” Donovan wrote back. “Nobody really targets newspaper writing to the fifth- or sixth-grade level per se, but it does work out that way some of the time.”

Donovan went on to explain that there’s a fancy linguistic formula called the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level scoring method that can determine the “grade level” of a sentence. “And it just so happens that many kinds of newspaper writing are most effective when they follow rules that conform to lower Flesch-Kincaid scores,” he continued. “For example, writers doing game reports or the cops/courts beat usually strive to state the facts as plainly and directly as possible. These stories might often fall into that fifth/sixth-grade level.” Other items, such as an art review, might contain more sophisticated language and would therefore score higher on the scale. But for the most part, Donovan wrote, the Star prides itself on its Hemingway-era style sheet, which stresses simplicity.

Well, it’s nice to know that we haven’t been imagining things. So it makes no sense to challenge the paper to publish naughty words from a novel such as The Catcher in the Rye, another book that Harmon and her supporters object to on their Web site, www.classkc.org.

We tried to contact Harmon to let her know that their challenge was truly boneheaded. If she wanted to see the dirty words from J.D. Salinger‘s book in a newspaper, why didn’t she contact one that’s actually aimed at folks with a high school or better reading comprehension level — namely, this one?

Well, Harmon has neglected the Strip’s numerous attempts to contact her, but we decided to take the challenge nonetheless. Here are all the words that bother Harmon so much from the beloved tale told by Holden Caulfield:

Goddam, bitch, hell, bull, damn, bastard, faggy, Chrissake, sonovabitch, butt, God, ass, Jesus Christ, whore, fuck.

We’re sure any high schooler who has managed to get a copy of this has now fainted.

“That’s funny, [rib roast],” Agar admitted when we told him that he had too much respect for the Star. As for challenging the Pitch instead? “I didn’t do that, because I knew that you would print it. You regularly print those words anyway. But I don’t know that your paper is the kind these parents want their children to see.”

Yeah, this chuck steak hears that. Thank goodness the Pitch isn’t available for free on street corners.

The Strip was also hoping to ask Harmon about something the Star apparently left out of its long interview with her. Last year, the Blue Valley School District formed a special curriculum subcommittee to oversee the district’s policies regarding parents’ objections to reading materials. The committee unanimously approved the rules in question.

Janet Harmon was on that committee.

Apparently, she’s had second thoughts.

The district has already been enormously accommodating to her. Last year, she objected to a book that a teacher had assigned to her freshman son. The district pointed out that it already allowed any parent who disapproved of a required book to request an alternative.

So there must be hundreds of students and their parents who have objected to classroom reading materials and selected alternative books, right?

“In our four high schools, it’s less than ten,” says Russ Kokoruda, the district’s executive director of school administration.

Only ten? Hmm. Well, we just hope no one hands a copy of this article to those ten students. They might be scarred for life.
Tony Ortega talks about this week’s Pitch with KRBZ 96.5’s Lazlo after 4 p.m. Wednesday.