But Not Banned in Boston

  

Founded literally a century ago, PEN America has a very simple mission statement: “PEN America stands at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide. We champion the freedom to write, recognizing the power of the word to transform the world. Our mission is to unite writers and their allies to celebrate creative expression and defend the liberties that make it possible.” And while they have dealt with zealots of every kind and description over the years, today they face book-banning as part of an overriding existential threat to American democracy itself.

The truth is that the United States did not and does not have a genuine issue of making school children feel guilty about America’s embarrassing history with slavery, Jim Crow and later racial, ethnic and religious discrimination. There are no school districts in the United States where that guilt-trip is part of any public-school curriculum. There are no teachers “grooming” young children to change their gender identity or sexual preferences. There are already longstanding laws to prosecute teachers who impose sexual seduction or inappropriate contact with students.

There is no reason to anoint individual (and often biased or even bigoted) parents with the right to control what is taught in classrooms. We do not need new criminal sanctions, mandatory school board reviews or financially incented PAGA-enabled (citizens as private attorneys general watchdogs) lawsuits based on any complaint on library content, teachers or textbooks that parents believe are proselytizing that guilt. We do not need to make students who are “different” feel bad about traits they did not choose that are generally socially and legally acceptable.

We are not “protecting” children by filtering history or reality. Indeed, as George Santayana has stated: “Those who do not study history are condemned to repeat its mistakes.” Germany has so taken that philosophy to heart that a child cannot graduate from the German equivalent of high school without a mandatory tour of a concentration camp (replete with photographs and hard examples of the death and torture that took place). Future Hitlers won’t do well in that country.

The entire notion of a “culture war” or supporting anti-“CRT” (critical race and gender discrimination theory) statutes is nothing more than a right-wing politically manufactured “problem” – one that simply does not really exist – to get MAGA candidates elected or continue to hold office… to find a “solution.” And those “solutions” are profoundly anti-democratic right-wing pablum, pandering to politically manufactured fears… polarization on steroids. The first map above, from PEN America, reflects states where such culturally unacceptable books have actually been banned from public-school classrooms and/or public libraries. The second, from ABC News (March 22nd), shows where anti-CRT laws are proposed or have been passed, all sponsored by GOP legislators. The third chart, also from PEN America, focuses on the banned subject matter.

This repressive censorship is accelerating. Writing for the September 20th Los Angeles Times, Dorany Pineda examines the results of a PEN American report on such book bans: “If you’ve read a book in one sitting sometime in the last year, chances are another book was banned before you finished it… According to a report from PEN America released Monday [9/19], a book ban was enacted in an American school district every 3½ hours between July 2021 and July 2022.

“The eye-opening report showcases how widespread book banning has become and how quickly it is accelerating. Nearly 140 school districts in 32 states issued more than 2,500 book bans during the 2021-22 school year, which affected nearly 4 million students across 5,000 schools, according to the report, ‘Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools.’

“This movement is also targeting public libraries, including efforts to close or defund them and to fire, harass or otherwise intimidate librarians… ‘This censorious movement is turning our public schools into political battlegrounds, driving wedges within communities, forcing teachers and librarians from their jobs, and casting a chill over the spirit of open inquiry and intellectual freedom that underpin a flourishing democracy,’ Suzanne Nossel, chief executive of PEN America, said in the report.

“Book-banning efforts have rapidly spread across the country at a pace not seen in decades, fueled in part by politics, social media and increasingly aggressive tactics. Among the books most frequently pulled from classrooms and school libraries are those about race, racism, gender and sexuality. Books that feature protagonists of color accounted for 40% of books banned; those with LGBTQ characters and themes made up 41%. [See above chart]

“The new report also documents the growing number of organizations and coordinated groups ramping up efforts to ban books, with parents and community groups playing some role in at least half the book bans across the country during the last school year. In a few cases, people lodging complaints about books did not have children in public schools at the time. They range from Facebook groups to nonprofits like Moms for Liberty.

“PEN America counted at least 50 groups promoting bans, most of them established in the last year… ‘The groups have found ways to put pressure on school boards, and they were really not prepared for this,’ said Jonathan Friedman, the report’s author and director of free expression and education programs at PEN America. ‘They have not in recent memory been standing up for access to diverse literature in school libraries, so a lot of them were caught off guard ... and as a result, they have given into these demands without much process.’” Who are the real losers?

Do people really believe that parental micromanagement of public-school curricula makes for better, more competitive students… future citizens who will be able to make informed decisions at the polls? Pretending that all “normal” human beings are completely heterosexual is real? Why are we spending so much time, effort and money on a non-issue when the rest of the world is focusing on improving academic subjects, particularly economy-growing STEM education?

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you are wondering why our test scores are falling in comparison to other countries, take a good hard look at our priorities in classrooms across the land.