Opinion: Banning books, censoring information, won't keep our kids from the truth

It's hard to understand why Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis seems to despise Disney World as much as he does, when fantasy is what he does best. Because no matter how hard you try to float above reality, the laws of gravity will always tug you back down to Earth.

Among the growing list of the governor’s reprehensible activities is his determination to make sure that indoctrination replaces education in Florida schools. This stems from the widely shared fear among the MAGA-controlled Republican base that the young people might actually develop questions about the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave once they begin to learn the uncomfortable truth about such things as slavery, how the west was really won, and what took so long to allow women the right to vote. So DeSantis figures the best way to prevent this potential catastrophe of an educated citizenry is to bomb the station before the train departs.

But the attempt to protect the people from the threat of fact-based intelligence isn’t just going on in Florida, it’s a Hail Mary arcing across the entire country promoting the desperate MAGA belief that if they can just turn out the lights in America’s classrooms fast enough, maybe the kids won’t realize they’re sitting in a dark room. Maybe, just maybe, they’ll stop being woke and become convinced it was always that way.

Recently, the MAGA Republicans in charge of the U.S. House of Representatives proposed a “Parents’ Rights” bill that would give parents complete authority over what is taught in schools and which books and other media are appropriate. I’m assuming that means all right-thinking parents who have been properly indoctrinated and are MAGA-approved, and not all American parents.

The bill, introduced by Louisiana Republican U.S. Rep. Julia Letlow, requires schools to notify parents that they have the right to review the curriculum and school budget, inspect books and other library materials, and prevent students in grades 5-8 from using their preferred pronouns or gender identity.

Republicans in Texas and Florida are leading the way. But in most of these so-called "red states," banning books not only affects choices for adults and children, but includes threats to educators at all levels. Teachers, college instructors and administrators are afraid of losing their jobs, and even having their teaching licenses revoked, if they don’t hastily remove books that have not received the MAGA miseducation stamp of approval.

So instead of deciding which book is or is not suitable for absorption by young minds, and risking the consequences of any potential misstep, teachers are ceding their authority to the MAGA hive mind. Which has made the calculation that MAGA and only MAGA has the proven capability to screen all loose-floating information, sorting out the ugly bits of fact and reality, leaving behind only the nutrient-free pap deemed acceptable for digestion by young brains.

It should come as no surprise that the most-often banned books include LGBTQ+ topics and stories, the histories of Black Americans and other non-white Americans, anything on race and racism, biographies and autobiographies of non-white people, and stories about non-Christian religions and members of those religions.

Because if you ban a book, then certainly the children have no way of seeking out that information, right?

Yeah. Sure thing.

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Obviously, whoever made this determination doesn’t have any kids, and knows nothing about the internet. If the kids want to know, the kids will find out. And when the kids find out the truth, despite the attempt of misguided adults to shield them from that truth, they tend to get upset. And that’s when they educate themselves – and then act accordingly. The Black Lives Matter protest, led by the youth in response to the police murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, turned into the largest racial justice protest in American history, and then into a global racial justice protest unlike anything ever seen before.

Over the past several weeks, the young have been at it again. More than 6,000 students descended on the Tennessee State Capital in Nashville on April 3 to crowd the halls, demanding that their elected state representatives do something about the out-of-control gun violence in their state that most recently resulted in the deaths of three 9-year-old children and three adults just days prior, once again at a school. The adult response was to expel the two young, recently-elected African American legislators who were actually listening to the kids and acting on their behalf.

What DeSantis and others tripping along the same twisted path haven’t yet figured out is that these kids have already learned the lessons Republicans are trying to pro-actively shield them from — and they’re not having it. They know they are being lied to, and — at least in Nashville (to start) — they have made up their minds that they will crank their voices up to maximum disruption until someone pays attention.

Once again, it is the children who are providing the adults with an education. Summer is on the way, and school is just now getting in session.

Keith A. Owens is a local writer and co-founder of Detroit Stories Quarterly and the We Are Speaking Substack newsletter and podcast. Contact the Free Press opinion page: letters@freepress.com. Become a subscriber at Freep.com. 

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Opinion: Banning books, censoring curriculum, will backlash