School board treading dangerously by removing books | Opinion
On high school registration day this year, I watched with a sense of existential dread as an English teacher rolled a cart full of Primo Levi and Shakespeare paperbacks out of the classroom. Survival in Auschwitz, I learned, was being temporarily removed from my children's curriculum; the Holocaust memoir was being sent off to a staging area to be formally approved or disapproved by a Committee of Concerned Grown-Ups.
Macbeth, according to an interpretation of new State recommendations, was now considered unfit for tenth-grade minds.
Such are the unintended consequences of political overreach. In an absence of Covid masking battles, "parental rights" organizations have pivoted to culture wars and book banning. History has shown us time and again the fundamental error in these restrictive policies. Removing reading material in the name of liberty amounts to double-speak, nothing more or less than a contorted mirror-image of cancel culture.
According to Florida's Stop W.O.K.E. Act –– a law intended to abolish the teaching of Critical Race Theory in our school system –– books are deemed discriminatory if they "compel the students to believe that they must feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress because of actions in which the person played no part, committed in the past by members of the same race or sex."
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One may agree or disagree with the notion of original sin, but the groups behind Stop W.O.K.E. would do well to remember another Book that begins with this very same lesson.Be that as it may, the assault on the canon is not even a pragmatic one. Today's teenagers have nearly unlimited access to far more insidious material than Steinbeck, Vonnegut, or even Sapphire. Growing up in the iPhone age, they must navigate an increasingly transparent, hyper-complex world, where toxic content is readily available at their fingertips. It is a lucky parent whose child spends time reading physical books rather than engaging with Tik Tok or Gas app.
By shining a spotlight on a list of objectionable classics, we make it more likely, not less, that children will eventually seek them out. We would be better served to visit our public libraries with them and educate them as to the best way to navigate the shelves. Liberty means more books, more choices, more trust, more discernment.And what lessons are these Concerned Grown-Ups actually imparting? That governmental bodies and policy makers hold the answers to our problems? That accountability and punishment have more value than compassion and conversation? That we should relish in the battle when we meet a viewpoint we disagree with?
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I can well understand the challenges we face in sending our children out of our sight-lines for seven hours a day. But public schools are microcosms of our society writ large. When a child comes home with questions about transsexuality, or abortion, or the history of slavery, or any issue we feel strongly about, we must recognize it as a teachable moment. Instead of instilling in our children a fear of indoctrination, or attempting to eliminate the questions from view, we have an opportunity to empower them, to prepare them for the wide variety of opinions they will surely encounter as adults, to fortify them with own values, and to analyze the reasons behind these differences in perspective.
That parents occasionally gather at school board meetings to decry books by Alice Walker and Toni Morrison is not terribly surprising. Nor should it shock anyone that while well-intentioned mothers bang their drums over the course of four-hour meetings, many of their children are at home watching ‘Euphoria’. But when the tenor of these meetings becomes gleefully combative, when the school superintendent is ousted and a newly elected school board member claims, "We are only as strong as our leader," it strikes a disturbing chord.The youth of Brevard County are stronger than the Concerned Grown-Ups give them credit for. Perhaps a more enlightening line would have been this –– "We are only as strong as our children."
Dan Reiter is a writer and a parent of two Brevard County high schoolers.
This article originally appeared on Florida Today: School board treading dangerously by removing books | Opinion
