Careful you don't get whiplash. Progressives are now against censorship again.

Censorship is acceptable when it restricts the free exchange of ideas, but not when it protects children from inappropriate material in a school library. 

In other words, they're kind of non-binary when it comes to logical consistency.

A Utah school district is removing a number of books that have little to do with the purpose of schools and at least some of which are clearly intended to familiarize children with the finer points of gender ideology, and the folks at Daily Kos are none too happy about it.

Utah school district removes more than 50 books from public school libraries, thanks to new law https://t.co/gUsuSifdaI

— Daily Kos (@dailykos) August 5, 2022

Among the books the elimination of which has scandalized the left-wing critics at Daily Kos, are Queer: The Ultimate LGBT Guide for Teens, This Book is Gay, and Two Boys Kissing. One of the books the Utah school librarian apparently thought was appropriate for children is Gender Queer, the same book Louisville parents have protested on the grounds (among other things) that it has explicit portrayals of two males, possibly minors, engaged in oral sex.

In other words, something that quite possibly constitutes child pornography.

No depredation dare stand in the way of the promotion of gender ideology.

Book Burning Bummer: Bible censored from Banned Books Week documents

This week is Banned Books Week and once again the people who preach to the rest of us about the evils of censorship have averted their eyes to the most banned book of all: The Bible.

As in previous years, the oh so sanctimonious American Library Association has issued their top ten list of most frequently challenged books. But the one book censored by virtually all public schools didn't make the list.

Oh, wait, maybe the longer list of "Banned & Challenged Classics" will mention it in its catalog of 97 such books. But, alas, it is absent.

Surely the "100 most frequently challenged books: 2000-2009" will have it. Nope. Nor does Moses, Luke, or St. Paul make the list of "Most frequently challenged authors of the 21st century." In fact, a complete search of the "2013-2014 Books Challenged or Banned"for the term "Bible" produced the following result:

"0 document(s) with 0 instance(s)" 

Some people will argue that the Bible is not included in these reports because there have been no attempts to actively remove it from libraries or curricula because it is not included in these venues in the first place. So, in other words, it is not to be considered to be "censored" if it has already been successfully banned? Well that's convenient.

What's that word we use when people withhold a term from a document for political reasons? "Cen ...," "Cens ...," Give me a few minutes. I'll remember it.

Bibles Booted from U.S. Navy Base Guest Rooms

Where is the outrage from the liberals who are always lecturing us about the evils of censorship?

The U.S. Navy will no longer allow Bibles and other religious materials in the guest rooms of Navy lodges, a decision that has infuriated some conservative groups, which recently learned about the new policy. 

The Navy’s decision came after the Freedom From Religion Foundation sent a letter questioning the constitutionality of religious literature in the Navy lodges’ 3,000 guest rooms.
The June 19 directive from the Navy Exchange Service Command, which runs the Navy’s 39 guest lodges in the U.S. and abroad, allows religious materials to be made available to guests. 

But it forbids religious items to be placed in guest rooms, aligning the command, known as NEXCOM, with U.S. Navy policy, said NEXCOM spokeswoman Kathleen Martin.

On Tuesday the American Family Association made the directive the subject of its latest “action alert,” asking members to call Navy officials to reverse the decision. The Chaplains Alliance for Religious Liberty has called on the Navy to do the same. 

But supporters of the Navy directive, said it rights a constitutional wrong, in that the Establishment Clause does not allow the U.S. government to promote or favor any particular religion.

read more


http://ift.tt/1cf7PcC

Stephen Colbert on the censorship of Huckleberry Finn

And speaking of the censorship of Huckleberry Finn, here's Stephen Colbert on the issue:

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Huckleberry Finn Censorship
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> Video Archive

The Barney Frankification of Huckleberry Finn

I was listening to the NPR on the way to church the other day, and a report by Pippin Ross came on about a Moby Dick marathon in New Bedford, Mass., where 200 readers turned out the read the epic thing. Some of the readers were rather famous personages. One of them, unfortunately, was Congressman Barney Frank.

We join him in progress, reading Melville's great literary masterpiece:

FRANK: (Reading) At any rate, I made my mind and if so turned out that we sleep together, he must undress and get into bed before I did.

Uh oh. This could be trouble...

ROSS: The crowd is mostly into the meaning of Melville's writing. Congressman Frank sees the story as America's first step toward going green.

Mr. FRANK: It's a kind of striking thing to think that these enormous wondrous creatures were killed and captured only for their oil. And it was the discovery of electricity, an alternative form of energy, that led to the end of whaling.

There you have it. If you thought Frank was just a menace to the nation's economy, now you know what might happen if he were to get his hands on our literature. But the penchant to change what we read to conform to our own prejudices is one thing when it remains in the mind of a politically correct congressman from Massachusetts; it's another if changes it for the rest of us.

Hilary Kelly at the New Republic, writes one of the better defenses of the integrity of literature in regard to the current attempt to censor of Huckleberry Finn.

... But conventional is not the same as inoffensive; and my wholesome library is riddled with passages that are, by our standards, ugly and obscene. Old books, the ones we call classics, are often fascinating and offensive in the same measure, for the same reasons. Reading is an activity that frees our mind to parse moral and emotional complications, as we dig through the dilemmas of fictional characters and grapple with the fruits of our discovery. Often, those dilemmas are of a comprehensible and even banal nature—the stuff of ordinary experience, which transcends differences of time and place. But sometimes, we come upon characters or sentiments that repel us, that we find hard to comprehend and also to condone. We discover that our most cherished authors do not follow our own codes of civility, and their writing is scarred with racism, sexism, and the like.

The noteworthy thing is that we continue to be moved by these same morally imperfect books. Edith Wharton’s cruel representation of the Jew in the character of Simon Rosedale does not quite ruin or disqualify The House of Mirth. Despite its narrow views on evangelical Christianity, I keep coming back to Jane Eyre. As for the ill treatment of women—the canon is rife with it. We frequently encounter “offensive” material wrapped in delightful, elegant, illuminating narrative, and we can do nothing, save stop reading these novels and plays, to avoid it. The authors are no longer around to receive our protests, or to alter their work—and only they would have the authority to do so. We can scribble our rage in the margins, but the text we must leave alone.

... And so, the removal of the word “nigger” from Huckleberry Finn is another chink in the armor of our critical thinking. If the n-word is a barrier to reading Huckleberry Finn, then I see all the more reason—I say this as a former teacher of literature to schoolchildren—why its retention is imperative. Novels are safe havens for young children, places to explore the dark sides of existence without real-world ramifications. That is why the study of fiction is itself a moral education. In this imaginative exploration of human weakness and error and cruelty, the student also encounters the reality of racism. Indeed, the classroom is the optimal environment for such an encounter. With the support and guidance of a teacher, the shock and the anger can be recognized and analyzed, and turned into a beneficial pedagogical experience. A lesson on racial epithets, and why we do not use them, and what their career has been in the history of American English—surely this is preferable to the avoidance of the subject, which is an exercise in cultural dishonesty.

And where will it end? Shall we have The Merchant of Venice without the merchant of Venice? Should we skip over Daniel Deronda entirely? How about using the latest in computer technology to remove the blackface from old “Amos and Andy” clips? Might the world be a better place without the oeuvre of Henry Miller?

In other words, just wait: Shakespeare and George Eliot might be next. Read the rest if this terrific article here.

Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer censored by publisher

New South Books, based in Montgomery, Alabama, is censoring two of Mark Twain's great literary masterpieces: Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Publishers plan to replace the 'n' word with "slave" to sooth the sensibilities of readers of these books who apparently suffer from swooning episodes whenever they encounter the word.

Where are the protests from the American Library Association? Where are the Banned Books Week people? Where are all the groups who are always whooping and hollering every time some timid conservative parent raises her trembling hand to ask if a passage in some book chosen for a class is really appropriate?

The silence is deafening.

Yale University administrators are sissies

Yale University administrators, some of whom are men and some women (although it is sometimes unclear which are which), have proclaimed that a freshman class-sponsored t-shirt using the word "sissies" is unacceptable. The word was part of a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald that was to be included on a t-shirt in anticipation of the 2009 Harvard-Yale football game that read as follows:

"I think of all Harvard men as sissies"

Adam Kissel Director of the Individual Rights Defense Program wrote Yale President "Richard" Levin:

It is not a happy day when a Yale College dean with degrees from Yale and Princeton, an historian of art, declares that T-shirts quoting Fitzgerald are "not acceptable." "What purports to be humor by targeting a group through slurs is not acceptable," Dean Mary Miller wrote to the Yale Daily News, explaining her decision to "pull" the Freshman Class Council's democratically chosen design targeting Harvard students as "sissies."

Similar controversies have erupted over coaches who, trying to spur their players on to greater feats of athletic prowess on the court or on the gridiron, have employed terms such as 'wuss', 'wimp', and 'pansy'. John L. Smith, when he was the University of Louisville football coach, as I recall, was forced to publicly apologize for saying his players had "played like pansies" in a game in which they, well, played like pansies.

Not only is this one more sign of the increasingly intolerant Tolerance Police who engage in frequent and blatant censorship as the liberals who criticize such actions in every other context look the other way, but it is one more sign that our educational institutions are being run by people could be a little heavier in the loafers when it comes to doing the right thing.

The Persian King Xerxes is said to have declared, after observing the failure of his fleet in the Battle of Salamis in which a ship captained by a woman fared better than many of his ships captained by men, "My women have become men, and my men women." The same now seems to have occurred at many of our institutions of learning, where any open display of testosterone is received by the men who run them with cries of shock and alarm (and, one suspects, fainting spells), while the more masculine feminists elsewhere in administration and in the Women's Studies departments pat them on the head and tell them what good boys they are.

It's a sad situation--this world in which college administrators are such sissies.

What the Cultural Philistines Don't Know Can Hurt Them--and Us: Why some people disparage classic books

One of the big disappointments in the debate over curriculum standards that has ensued as a result of a Montgomery County, Kentucky high school rejecting elementary-level texts from an accelerated college prep course has been the derision expressed by some toward classic works. Go to the comment section of some of the posts on this issue under the "censorship" label below and weep. I think Thomas, my co-conspirator here on this blog, nailed it: the problem with so many students being judged incapable of reading high quality literature is not a problem with students, but a problem with educators.

The chief problem is not students who can't handle high quality literature, but teachers who can't handle it.

Several posters talked about kids "falling asleep" reading classic books. Others just said they were just too hard. These are the kinds of comments that come from people who are not themselves learned and who are projecting their own ignorance onto students. Any teacher who cannot gain and hold the interest of his students by reading and discussing "The Lady and the Tiger," by Frank Stockton, "The Whirligig of Life" by O. Henry, "How to Build a Fire" by Jack London, and "The Children's Story" by James Clavell needs to find another line of work.

I mention these short stories partly because I regularly teach them myself, but mostly to make it clear to the spectators in this debate that when you are talking about teaching classic literature to students, you're not necessarily talking about forcing an unprepared high school student to read Hamlet. There are plenty of works between "Goodnight Moon" by Margaret Wise Brown (a classic children's picture book for very young students) and Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Classic, quality works can be found for every different age level, and if they put your students to sleep, well, it ain't the fault of the book.

As Mortimer Adler used to point out, when students don't learn, it is almost always the fault of the teacher. "You can't be uplifted," he pointed out, "by something that isn't above you." Unfortunately our current method of education is a process in which the blind lead the blind. It is, of course, in the teachers interest to place the blame elsewhere, like on a book.

I think that the people who are mapping their own lack of education onto modern students are genuinely convinced that classic books can't be read or appreciated by young people. But just so we can see what can be done, let me give you the reading list for my English IV class I am teaching this semester to high school students in my Online Classical Academy:

Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
The Stranger, Albert Camus
"The Wall," Jean Paul Sartre
Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett
"A Clean Well-Lighted Place," Ernest Hemingway
"A Primer on Existentialism," Gordon Bigelow
"A Report for an Academy," Franz Kafka
"The Death of Ivan Ilych," Leo Tolstoy
The Violent Bear it Away, Flannery O'Connor
The Man Who Was Thursday, G. K. Chesterton
Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry
Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton

And that's just for this semester. We just finished discussing Chesterton's book today and have two more to complete before the end of January. My students not only have read them all, but they understand them--and love them. And they can articulate why.

Now there are no prerequisites or other requirements for this class other than that you want to take it. It is not billed as an "advanced" class, although I admit that my students are extremely bright. I would not want to attempt these particular books in a normal public high school class. But there are other books--books that, by and large, my students have already read--that are classics also--that they could read and enjoy.

But the important thing is this: one of the reasons my students love these books is because I know them and love them myself. That's why I can teach them and inspire my students to love them too. I would submit that the educators who say classic works cannot be taught in today's classrooms say it because they do not themselves possess the knowledge and love of classical literature. And that's a shame.

The next time you hear one of the commenters on this blog running down some classic work and asserting that it would put a student to sleep, it's probably because it would put him to sleep, and therefore it can't but do the same for everyone else. Ask him about his own educational background, and I bet you will find that it was mostly devoid of classic literature and lacking in academic rigor. What you will find is a person who has not encountered these books himself and can't comprehend how others could have and have benefited from the experience.

I do not blame these people for not getting the kind of education they should have gotten. They are not at fault for being ill-educated. But they are at fault for contributing to the cultural illiteracy that now infects our schools and that will result in one more generation of badly educated people.

Barbarians at the Gate: A response to Chris Crutcher on the Montgomery County curriculum case

I'm still rubbing my eyes in disbelief that a rural Kentucky school district is defending itself against its national detractors for setting its academic standards too high. The next time someone makes a disparaging remark about Kentucky being some kind of educational backwater, I'm going to remind them about the Montgomery County High School case in which a school district, in demanding that an accelerated college prep course use literature with higher than a 6th grade reading level, was accused by a mob of national critics of censorship.

Chris Crutcher, author of Deadline, one of the books taken out of the curriculum in an advanced course at Montgomery County High School, has, unfortunately, joined the barbarian hordes battering on schoolhouse doors demanding a lowering of academic standards. His reasons for supporting the Decline and Fall of Academic Standards are laid out in his remarks in the comment section of my previous post on this issue

Crutcher's first point is about Superintendent Daniel Freeman's remark that the books were for "reluctant readers":

I guess I'd like to comment on Superintendent Freeman's assertion that none of these books will help students when they go to college, that they are for "reluctant readers." For one thing, a lot of students going to college are also reluctant readers.

The issue, as I keep pointing out in this debate, is that this is an accelerated college preparatory course we are talking about. Why would there be reluctant readers in an advanced college preparatory course? If they are in it, there are only two possibilities: either they do not belong in the class, in which case they should be placed in another class on grounds that they're not ready for it, or they do belong in it, in which case they should replace the class on grounds that the class is not what it purports to be.

Freeman understand this, but Crutcher doesn't seem to, which makes Crutcher's accusation that Freeman is somehow lacking in awareness of the important issues here somewhat ironic. the second point was about what is appropriate for a college preparatory course in high school:

Also, the issues focused on in many of these books are issues kids will face in college. I challenge Dr. Freeman to become a bit more informed regarding what many college professors expect from their students. I speak at colleges and universities all the time and my books, including Deadline, are part of many curriculums.

The chief issue in college is how to handle higher level material. If Crutcher things that the best way to prepare students for higher level material is to familiarize them with lower level material, it is hard to know what to say except that his is a novel approach to college preparation. Maybe the football team at Montgomery County High School should start lowering the amount of weight the players are lifting in the gym to make their muscles bigger, huh?

Crutcher's own book is apparently written at a 6th grade reading level according to the lexile measurement. Now Crutcher maintains that those like Freeman who believe that books written at a 6th grade reading level (others of the books involve here score as low as 3rd grade reading level) aren't appropriate for a college prep course are unfamiliar with what colleges expect from their students.

Crutcher can be saying only two things here: either that his books are at a high enough intellectual level to qualify them for college prep reading or that college curricula are now in such a debased state that they are using young adult fiction in their curricula. We know the first isn't true because these books are written on an elementary reading level. So we are left with the second, a conclusion that can only be the cause of despair about the state of higher education.

As I asked in the comments section of the original post on this issue, which colleges are using young adult fiction in a serious college level course? I want the names of the colleges that are doing this so we can make sure prospective students know what they're getting for the $20-$30K that they are now being asked to fork over per year for a supposedly university level education.

Mr. Freeman's assertion about college bound kids and curriculum for college bound students is either disingenuous or misinformed. I ache for the old conservatism. My father was a World War II bomber pilot, a patriot and a conservative to his core. He was far better read than Dr. Freeman (for one thing, he read MY books) and there was nary a classic from which he couldn't quote. He was on the school board from the time my older brother started school until the time my younger sister graduated. And he would have run a nail through his eye before he would have allowed this kind of censorship. And it IS censorship. Agreed, Dr. Freeman did not BAN a book if the books are still available to all kids in the school library, but he did censor.

Does Crutcher really believe that taking actions to strengthen the academic level of a curriculum is censorship? If he does, then he has a very strange definition of censorship. If he really believes this, then his definition of censorship is so broad as to be meaningless. It means that any curricular decision that selects some books and reject others is an act of censorship, which in turn means that most of what curriculum staff in schools do is censorship.

This is not only silly, it is preposterous.

In the old days, conservatives invited ideas. They weren't afraid to discuss and debate issues that made them uncomfortable. They also heartily believed in the separation of church and state, for the good of the church AND the state.

In the old days liberals did accuse serious people making serious decisions about what belongs in a curriculum with censorship. They weren't afraid to discuss and debate issues without charging their detractors with the suppression of ideas either. And in regard to church and state...

... What does church and state have to do with debate? This has to be a textbook example of a red herring: a point that has nothing to do with the question at issue. The debate has absolutely nothing to do with church and state. If it does, Crutcher ought to explain why. Did Freeman quote the Bible or something? Was his church involved in this decision?

These kinds of debates are in one sense disappointing because they show that the people who are in charge of the much of the popular culture in our country--in and out of schools--are clearly not capable of making fundamental distinctions like that between popular culture and academic culture, between what does and does not constitute serious literature, and what is and isn't censorship.

Here's an alternative look at what is good for college bound kids: Read everything you can get your hands on.

No. Sorry. One of the worst problems we have is that there is a flood of literary junk out there. I spend a lot of time in bookstores and at book sales and I read and read about reading. The tide of poor quality literature is at close to epidemic proportions. The exact thing we shouldn't do is to have our children "read everything they can get their hands on."

The chief reading problem today is the lack of discrimination. Picking out books isn't like gorging yourself at a buffet; it's like panning for gold: most of what you pick up isn't worth much. You have find the stuff that is worth your trouble. And the nice thing about it is that much if it has already been done for you. In the case of older books, the vetting has already been done for you, otherwise they wouldn't still be around. In the case of new books, the problem of determining whether they're worth reading is more difficult.

In any case, the judgment about whether a book is good or not is not always the same as the question of whether it needs to be part of a curriclum, and the question of whether it should be part of a curriculum is not a matter of censorship.

Do you have to have read a book to say anything about it at all? More on the Montgomery County "censorship" case

Well, to say that I have stirred up a hornet's nest would be an understatement. My last post on the so-called Montgomery County, Kentucky "censorship" case has received more hits than any post featured on this blog since its inception. It has also garnered quite a few comments. Rather than answer the hornets in the comments section of the earlier post (the buzzing there has gotten to be deafening), I'm going to answer them here, in separate posts, since I think the points are important enough to be featured on the main page.

I don't know, but it seems that the comments are of two main types: First, from First Amendment Fundamentalists (I'm detecting the presence of librarians who mistakenly think the First Amendment quite literally protects any form of expression), and secondly from public school English teachers with rather low standards of what constitutes good literature. I don't doubt the sincerity of either group, but, as I will indicate below, the arguments for their positions are lacking in a number of respects.

Let me take the first of these arguments today, and I'll address the other arguments as the week progresses:

"Excuse me, sir, but I fail to see how you can reasonably comment about books you've never read." (From Ellen Hopkins). That would depend on what my purpose was. Certainly I cannot offer any kind of exhaustive evaluation of the books if I haven't read them, and if I were actually reviewing the books, I would be obligated to do just that. But I'm not reviewing the books, I'm simply commenting on whether or not an action by a school district constitutes censorship, whether there is a valid line that can be drawn between books that deserve to be in an accelerated college preparatory curriculum, and whether parents who have read the books are in a position to take part in that judgment.

I said very clearly I had not read the books, indicating that I was giving only a tentative assessment of them--a skepticism, nothing more, about their worth. I based that skepticism on publishers comments and reviews of the books--as well as actual passages from the books. The argument that one is not allowed to have and express a tentative judgment of creative works is a rather strange position to try to defend. If one cannot glean a tentative opinion of a book from publishers' blurbs and reviews, then maybe Hopkins could tell me why they have such blurbs and reviews in the first place.

Are we really allowed no qualitative judgments about things that we have not actually experienced ourselves? If someone wanted to show "Debbie Does Dallas" in a high school classroom, would we really be required to view it ourselves in order to be justified in saying it was not appropriate? Are we supposed to refrain from warning our children not to take crack or meth because we haven't tried them ourselves? No one is arguing that these books are in the same class as these things, but the logic is the same.

We make tentative judgments like this all the time. In fact, a tentative judgment is required in order to decide whether to read a book (rather than do something else) in the first place. In fact, I wonder how many of the people criticizing me for expressing doubts over the merit if their paeans to teen angst have read the older and better works that the parents in Montgomery County would rather have in this accelerated curriculum.

In any case, unless you are a parent making a formal complaint, one isn't required to have read a book in order to express a vagrant opinion on a blog of whether or not parents who have read the books have the right to make the complaint. In this case the parents opposed including them in the curriculum because a) they did read the books and found them wanting and b) they did not consider them to contribute to the express purpose of the class, which is to prepare them for college at an advanced level.

Nor is one even required to know the specific literary qualities of a book to have an informed opinion of whether it belongs in a curriculum. For that, all that is necessary is to know what kind of book it is. And that's what, in spite of Hopkins opinion, makes my judgment so easy: Popular teen fiction doesn't belong in the curriculum of an accelerated high school college prep course.

Period.

Let me underscore this aspect of the Montgomery County case once again so we are very clear about it (Where's my megaphone?): THIS IS AN ACCELERATED COLLEGE PREPARATORY HIGH SCHOOL CLASS. Did we hear that?

A class like this is meant to challenge good students intellectually. If your students are challenged intellectually by these kinds of books, then they don't belong in this kind of class. There seems to be this assumption that students in an accelerated high school class are not capable of handling serious literature. If that's the case, then why are they in an accelerated high school class? And if you say that even kids in an accelerated college prep class can't handle classic books, then you have unwittingly acquiesced to the low appraisal that some of us regularly give to public schools.

And another thing. If you are going to make the argument that these kinds of books belong in that kind of class, then you are not an intellectually serious person. Sorry. That's not a moral judgment, just a statement of fact. If you don't like that judgment, then I'm afraid we're operating upon two completely different academic planets: mine, which is actually academic, and yours, which is not.

I fear that the real problem here is one I have drawn attention to on this blog over and over again: many of the people running our elementary and secondary educational institutions are not well-educated people. Well-educated people don't think that valuable academic time should be spent on popular teen books in advanced academic classes, the vast majority of which (the books I mean) will likely be forgotten in 20 years, if they last that long.

The argument is not whether these books are good books or not. I have expressed my skepticism that they are--no more than a literary hypothesis to be confirmed or not. The argument is over whether books that have proved themselves to have merit by standing the test of time, many of which are well within the grasp of moderately intelligent high school students, should be displaced by books that, whatever their worth, are unproven.

We are talking about students many of whom have not read Huckleberry Finn, the Grapes of Wrath, the Great Gatsby, and Crime and Punishment--and we're going to spend class time in a supposedly advanced high school class parsing the deepest darkest emotions of "Sophie" as she gets ready for her date with "smoky, sexy Dylan"?

Is this really what we've come to in our schools?

The Banning of Academic Rigor: Anti-censorship groups now calling enforcement of curriculum standards "censorship"

The civil liberties crowd is always looking for new things on which to slap the "censorship" label, but this time it has really outdone itself. It is now apparently considered censorship to push for higher educational content in schools.

In Montgomery County, Kentucky, several parents whose children are in an accelerated college preparatory class questioned several books a teacher had planned on using in the class because they don't adequately contribute to accelerated college preparation. The parents apparently had the crazy idea that putting their kids in an advanced college prep course meant that they would be reading academically challenging books instead of literary fluff.

This of course sent "anti-censorship" groups into paroxysms of indignation, all the more so because, in addition to the books being light on the intellectual side, they also contained some racy content, making them all the more worthy of inclusion in school curricula.

After the dust up, the Kid's Right to Read Project, a place where indignation sometimes gets in the way of common sense, fired off a letter to Montgomery County Superintendent Daniel Freeman:

But they picked a bad time to do it: right before "Banned Books Week."

The view of the parent who objects to the books is not shared by all, and she has no right to demand removal of the book. Public schools have the obligation to “administer school curricula responsive to the overall educational needs of the community and its children.” Leebaert v. Harrington, 332 F.3d 134, 141 (2d Cir. 2003).

Maybe in its next manifesto, the Kid's Right to Read Project could explain how the "overall education needs of the community and its children" are served by spending valuable time on literary cotton candy in a class that's supposed to be preparing students for the greater rigors of higher education.

You have to be careful what you do around the time of Banned Books Week because you might be unwillingly enrolled in the narrative that groups like the American Library Association propagate about conservatives running around the country censoring school books, a narrative that somehow always leaves out any coverage of the most banned book of all: the Bible.

The books in question in the Montgomery County case were these:

Twisted by Laurie Halse Anderson
Deadline by Chris Crutcher
Lessons from a Dead Girl by Jo Knowles
The Rapture of Canaan by Sheri Reynolds
What My Mother Doesn't Know by Sonya Sones
What My Girlfriend Doesn't Know by Sonya Sones

Now I haven't read these books, and, being an English instructor and a fairly well-read person, I've never, with one exception, even heard of them either. If they're on a list of great books somewhere, I've never encountered it. Maybe they're appropriate for a course on Early 21st Century Lightweight Pop Fiction for Bored Teenagers, but a college prep course? C'mon.

The only book that has any reputation at all is The Rapture of Canaan, a story with the not-very-original politically correct plot line about an evil fundamentalist church called "The Church of Fire and Brimstone and God's Almighty Baptizing Wind." There's realism for you. And it is a measure of its literary quality that it impressed Oprah, who made it a selection for her Book Club in 1997.

According to "teenreads.com," undoubtedly a bastion of discriminating literary taste, Knowles Lessons from a Dead Girl "does a credible job of exploring friendships, particularly those of girls, in all their complexity and depth." I bet.

These are books about self-obsessed teenagers with names like "Chip," "Lainey," "Rudy," and "Chaz" who are depressed because they didn't make the football team or are upset because they can't figure out what dress to wear for homecoming. Including books like these in a serious college prep course is a little like screening Beach Blanket Bingo at a classic film festival.

Minus the bad language, sexual themes, and the drug abuse, they might pass for some of the cheap fiction my friends and I used to read in school. If you would have told us at the time that books like this would be brought into a college prep class by teachers and taken seriously, we would have had a big laugh and thought that that would be pretty cool. But that's because we were ignorant teenagers who hadn't yet developed anything remotely resembling judgment.

As it turns out, some people never did--and many of them are apparently teachers.

The teacher in whose class such literary specimens were to be held up as examples of quality literature was Risha Mullins. While students in a serious class might be reading Shakespeare's Hamlet proclaiming "To be or not to be," Miss Mullins students are treated to characters soliloquys include lines like "I was a zit on the butt of the student body."

Impressive stuff, you'll have to admit.

Mullins apparently travels the country giving lectures to other teachers on promoting student reading. This, in and of itself, is a scary thought.

If merely trying to maintain some reasonable level of quality in the literature students read at school is now to be labeled censorship, then the odds of improving schools may have just become prohibitive.

In the Montgomery County case, all you had was parents challenging whether books deserved a place in the curriculum of a college prep course. They weren't removed from the school library or eliminated from the readings for the reading club there. They were adjudged unfit for a place alongside Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales.

Oh, and then there's Kentucky's state teachers union, which, with admirable consistency, almost always gets it wrong, rushing to the aid of the teacher, whose job they claim is in jeopardy despite the fact that it's not. Action against the teacher hasn't even been considered. It's simply a question of deciding what gets taught in a class, a judgment that is made every day and gets that much more difficult when national groups whose only interest is making a few cheap headlines stick their bothersome noses in places they don't belong.

UPDATE: I have begun responding to some of the arguments made in the comments section of this post here. My first response addresses the question whether a person is justified in making certain assertions about books they have not themselves read. Other responses will be noted here as they are posted.