Book bans

The surge in book bans, or at least attempts, across the country is challenging and like most things in education, is nowhere near as simple or as black-and-white as is suggested by so many commentators. I will share some of my thoughts below.

The starting point on which we must agree is that there should be some limit, some line, some set of criteria to rule a book in or out. We have the fire in a theater limitation to speech and the nuclear weopn limit to the second amendment. However when one group asserts no limitations and the other complete restrictions, there can only be noise and no progress.

A corollary to this is that we must agree there should be limit on what is available, ie in a library, and what is taught, ie as a part of a curriculau, and that this should vary from Elementary ot Middle to High Schools. Public or community libraries and bookshops are different things since they do not involve what is in effect a captive audience of impressionable minds.

(Personally, I do not think "How to buld a bomb" or "How to bring down a 747 using your cellphone" should be available at all, but that is a topic for a wider societal conversation.)

Once we accept that there should be a line drawn and that this could vary from level to level and from in-program to in-library, we can then discuss where to draw this line and on what bases.

Firstly, there is an argument that some books are not appropriate for a class study but are still valuable, and should be available via the library. One reason is that not every student is ready for War and Peace or that the program has no space to include every Shakespearian tragedy Perhaps you have replaced Grapes of Wrath wth The Jungle, but still want your interested and/or advances students to read both. Perhaps you have a wider reading or literary analysis paper required in your evaluation protocol.

I have a personal experience in this matter. In my first year teaching, a senior student wrote in a response piece that one of the characters in the text we were studying deserved to be raped. She did not say the rape could be explained in the context of the text or by the mindset of the perpetrator, but that it was deserved. I suggested she read another text, written from the perspective of a rape victim. 

A few days later, I was in the principal's office. Her parents had made a formal complaint against me for exposing their daughter to this material which went against their very right-wing fundamentalist Christian views of the role and place of women. Nothing happened to me because the book was not compulsory or a required text, was available in the school library and the student was 17 or 18 and in G12. 

I have wondered over the last 40 or so years if I should have made such a suggestion and I still think "yes". I do not think I should have handed her the book or required her to read it or indeed reauired her to have any specific response. However, I did make her aware of a different perspective to something she had espoused for her to explore, and I do think that that was and is appropriate. 

Secondly, I think we need to start from first principles when discussing required texts, why do we teach literature? I think ultimately, we want to develop the sklls of critical reading, textual analysis and reasoned argument plus of course those of expressing the fruits of these in written and spoken form. In this framework, text choice is a secondary matter. In fact, I routinely chose The Great Gatsby and Animal Farm because they are so accessible and open to such skills development.

We also want to expose students to texts they would not normally choose and/or to works in the Great American or Great Western canon, thus Shakespeare, Poe and Mockingbird.

In neither of these justifications does political position take priority. It is of course impossible to separate the politics from the cultural or from the historical, and these are all important considerations in literary analysis or discussion. Thus Macbeth and its discussion of ambition and the role of the distaff is not suited for Middle or Elementary levels, or The Scarlet Letter and its presentation of judgment and persecution.

A teacher who, or a program which, selects a work specifically because of its "message" is I think hugely problematic, and is what has fueled up the book banning bus. Many of the titles being bandied about in the media appear to have chosen for this reason, and while they should arguably be available in a school library, they should arguably not be included in the classroom.

But first, agree on the line and then secondly, agree on where to draw it.

**Please leave queries or comments below.**