TEMPERING PRINCIPLE WITH PRACTICALITY.

Of late, I have been writing repeatedly about government schools, and the censorship therein implied.  "The unifying theme in that conversation is that Somebody in Public Office is establishing content standards, and the tussle among Critical Studies pedagogues or school board members endorsed by teachers' unions or school board members elected by conservative populists is over who gets to be the censor, even if it's under the rubric of establishing content standards."

Fordham Institute's Daniel Buck, who has taught in middle school classrooms, offers a related perspective in "Stop calling them book bans."

I spent years as an English teacher, spending my days reading books with kids. These aren’t book bans. This isn’t a “culture war” debate over censorship, but an inevitable, even healthy argument that boils down to which books, for which reason, at what age, and in what venue.

Calling each of these decisions a “ban” blurs categorical distinctions that deserve to be taken seriously. There’s a difference between a school switching one book out for another in its curriculum, a librarian removing a book because it’s outdated or age-inappropriate, a major company like Target or Amazon de-platforming a book, and the federal government black-bagging dissidents found with samizdat materials. The latter two may in fact be bans—they limit everyone’s access to a text—but anyone who wants to can easily go down the street and buy for themselves plenty of books not in school libraries.

In reality, politicians and activists on both left and right engage in restricting access to books. If anything, the left engages in broader censorship.

His essay uses a broader concept of censorship than I do.  Banned in Boston. Censorship.  The Motion Picture Commission labels a French "film" (because no Serious Intellectual would go to the movies) "Adults Only."  Probably not, and he and I likely understand "age-inappropriate" in much the same way.  The Harvard Co-op does not carry a book.  That's a business decision.  Barnes and Noble doesn't stock the Regnery line, or hides it away.  That's a business decision.

The main line of his argument is one of resource allocation.  Any curriculum involves numerous decisions over what to include and therefore what to leave out.

There are countless reasons to include or exclude a book in a library and on a curriculum: difficulty, genre, age appropriateness, thematic variety, aesthetic value, and historical significance, among others. Tastes change. Societal values change. And so curricula will change. The books our students read in school shape their character, form their worldview, and more broadly inculcates our national values. What our students read is no flippant affair.

Calling such changes “bans” stymies this essential discussion. A choice between The Diary of Anne Frank or Maus raises interesting questions. Are graphic novels equal in literary merit to traditional texts? What effect on literacy development would each genre have? How and when do we expose our children to the horrors in human history? Can we have these arguments civilly still?

It’s a debate that goes back millennia. In ancient Athens, Socrates and his interlocutors argued over what passages of Homer to include and avoid in the education of children. They knew that what children read forms their minds and characters.

Yes, and the Acropolis was literally the hill Socrates chose to die on.  The necessity of allocating scarce resources we shall always have with us.  The authority to allocate resources becomes a political question, and thus will the censorship arise.

The average high school English curriculum covers anywhere from six to twelve books in a year, and the typical school library houses 10–15 thousand books. The inclusion and exclusion of this or that book is unavoidable. It’s basic curation and curricular construction. And we must have some limiting principles. No one would want a school shooter’s manifesto to provide the anchor text of a ninth grade English unit nor copies of Maxim to furnish the library in a kindergarten classroom.

Perhaps the more controversial question is “who decides?” The ALA doesn’t decry teachers or school boards banning books, but rather parental “censorship groups.” No one questions a librarian chucking an antiquated board book from the ‘60s. They bristle at parents dictating that the librarian do so.

Surely, some of these parent groups’ demands have been outlandish. Most recently, several organizations criticized a manga series, Assassination Classroom. The book is sophomoric—think Captain Underpants for high schoolers—but hardly nefarious or vulgar. Conversely, many complaints are understandable. An NBC article claimed that LGBT themes outraged parents but made no mention of what actually caused offense: graphic depictions of oral sex and masturbation.

But again, this is arguing over a book’s merit, not who decides.

Up to a point. The parents might be hoping for some common school equivalent of the Motion Picture Commission to slap that "Adults Only" restriction, or perhaps a PG-13 or NC-17 classification, on books and videos.  It's inevitably political all the same.

In short, parents should have some say in their child’s education. Most schools are public institutions, after all. If parents want to protest a book with sexually explicit images at a school board, I welcome it. That’s what a democratic, representative political process looks like. The school board and teachers are then welcome to acquiesce to or reject their demands.

That's very much in the spirit of my conclusion to that post.

"Safe space to discuss important topics" is not the same as "safe space for identity politics posturing" or "safe space for traditionalist posturing."  In the contest over what sort of censorship shall structure the curriculum, the fundamental mission of education, which is to say, equipping young minds with the ability to sort out the sensible from the silly, at ever more nuanced levels of sensible.

Look no further than a Milwaukee area report on Hartland Arrowhead's school board voting to limit the sorts of posters a teacher can display in a classroom to find the posturing.

Before the decision was made, dozens of teachers, students, parents, and others filled the Arrowhead South Library. Many of them voiced strongly whether they supported or opposed the policy.

"My child is scared as hell to come here because she doesn’t feel like there’s going to be a safe place for her," said one parent.

"These people have tried to hijack our schools for too long. Safe spaces are nothing more than places that dumb down our citizenry and our students," said another.

The lawyerly feeding frenzies will come next.