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Controversial Books in K-12 Classrooms and Libraries: Challenged, Censored, and Banned
Controversial Books in K-12 Classrooms and Libraries: Challenged, Censored, and Banned analyzes the history of controversy surrounding assigned reading in K-12 classrooms and books available in school libraries. Randy Bobbitt outlines the history of book banning and controversy in the United States, stemming from 1950s conservative Cold War values of patriotism and respect for authority and ramping up through the 1960s and onward as media coverage and parental intervention into the inner workings of schools increased. The author claims that sensitive topics, including sexuality, suicide, and drug use, do not automatically imply the glorification of deviant behavior, but can be used constructively to educate students about the reality of life. Bobbitt argues that in an effort to shield children from the dangers of controversial issues, parents and administrators are depriving them of the ability to discover and debate values that are inconsistent with their own and those around them, teaching instead that avoidance of different viewpoints is the solution. Scholars of education, communication, literature, and policy will find this book especially useful.
- GenresNonfiction
226 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 15, 2019
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February 20, 2022
An accessible and quick walkthrough of a history of book banning, first, globally, and second, by type-of-challenge. A balanced way of presenting both sides of the argument. Professionally/personally I am against book banning. I do not have kids. Here are my notes:
Clear cut anti-Censorship bumperstickers:
From a lawyer defending against a challenge: “Discomfort is a sign the message is being received” (84). This reminded me of Milos Forman talking about how much he loved state censors because they tell him exactly what he should be making films about.
“The real danger is not in the books, but laughing off those who would ban them,” Judy Blume said in a 1999 commentary in the New York Times defending the work of fellow young-adult author J.K. Rowling” (p.37). Is there also a danger in attempting to reason with them? It seems that thinking that winning over someone with facts and reasons and “smarts” is coded as leftist, and just fuels the fire more. Censorship and bannings must be approached with editorials like this as well as an agenda (just like there is an agenda for why they are censoring).
The never-ending logic defense: “If evaluation of any literary work is permitted to be based upon requirement that each book be free from derogatory reference to any religion, race, country, nation, or personality, endless litigation respecting many books would probably ensue, dependent upon sensibilities and views of the person suing,” the court ruled (p172).
The higher moral calling defense: “While school boards may give special regard to local values, they may not ignore their obligation to respect a diversity of values” (p176).
School boards are ground zero for this stuff, and anyway you cut it, people are going to be unhappy. For me a lot of this stems from people thinking that “not backing down” means “you’re wrong and I’m right,” but the idea should be more about “I can hold two conflicting ideas within my head at once” (3).
As I Lay Dying was pulled from a school in 1986. Public meeting attendance was sparse. And by the time they cut the book loose, students had “finished the book anyway” and teachers were going to discuss it “even without it in student hands” (155). We must ally with our Learning and Language colleagues.
"Reading books containing gay themes doesn't make students gay, counselors say, and reading books containing straight themes didn't prevent them from becoming gay. Reading books in the former category instead let gay students know they were not alone" (p119).
Self-censorship and self-selection / Don't Tread on Me
If one is going to battle against censorship it is important for us to be looking at the ways in which I might be censoring access to information. It could be through self-selection, inherent biases, personal experience, or whatever, but to my mind if we don’t do it we can stand on a platform of anti-censorship.
Massachusetts and New England's progressive or tolerant coding sets up this "it couldn't happen here" mentality, yet Concord, MA (bourgeois) librarians refused to put Huckleberry Finn on the shelf calling it trash in 1885. In Amherst, MA in 1987, parents attempted to ban a history textbook that called Reconstruction policies "harsh" and failed to mention Columbus's enslavement of native Americans. Bobbit sets up examples to explore the idea of "Reflecting the Culture vs. Protecting Children From It".
It's important to consider how we are aligned with other school departments and community assets. One director of instruction pulled a book that was challenged despite the challenge not going any further-- a “didn’t want to make a big deal out of it” (98) mindset. Teachers in Florida quit after three years of battling over censorship issues, and winning. I'm also interested in how a One Book / One School program could be a form of censorship-- assigning of one book without choice. Also, it can be a focus for controversy.
Textbook publishing is a form of soft censor by creating a hegemony of ideas. This focuses on the idea of banning books deemed un-American. Definitions of that term are way too fuzzy, obviously, but when it comes to textbooks, the easiest way to sell them is to keep them vanilla: a heteronormative nuclear family always being portrayed as clean, happy, and the standard of correctness.
Horrifying and serious
Revelations abound about marginalized identities being outcast and targeted as a result of fervor around banning books involving characters that look like them could amplify feelings of hate. One defender of challenges found people were walking out of restaurants they went to and saw threatening graffiti on walls of public restrooms. A religiously motivated challenge saw gun violence and bombings.
"A local nurse defended (Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon), despite the unusual passage, claiming that it "showed black people in a human perspective with all the problems and emotions of genuine people...What it did was put a human face on African Americans...and that makes people nervous.'"" (p86)
Ironic hilarity
Book banning has resulted in people losing their jobs and (in one instance that Bobbit points out) localized gun violence. It’s important to look at some of the ironies of these situations though:
Bobbitt points out on pages 9 and 10 that the same identity-based hate that is so obvious in the book banning is an extension of an educator stereotype: we are weak because we are “incapable of ‘more important careers.’ More specifically, those parents believed that male teachers were probably gay and female teachers had chosen spinsterhood over more important roles as homemakers” (9-10).
And then there’s also the thing about trying to suppress something (like a book, or photos of celebrities as the case was in 2003 there this idea was invented: “The psychological term often used in these cases is the ‘Streisand Effect’” (29). Everyone wanted to see Barbara’s photos, and everyone wants to read Gender Queer and Lawn Boy now. There is another example in the book about about a textbook publishing company pulling a short story collection because they do not want controversy: textbook publishers bound by different motivations.
The medium is sending the message, McLuhan tells us. Often the message of content is easily grasped but the harder-to-assess message is coming from the medium. Books more violent than Squid Game are still more dangerous. People are verified of books. The same thing happened with Thirteen Reasons Why, which was turned into a Netflix series and then was pulled from shelves in Colorado after a rash of suicides. Book: published 2007, show: produced in 2017. “Removing it from the library shelves would be easier than getting a Netflix to cancel the series” (18).
There's a book that was banned because people were drinking daiquiris in it.
Clear cut anti-Censorship bumperstickers:
From a lawyer defending against a challenge: “Discomfort is a sign the message is being received” (84). This reminded me of Milos Forman talking about how much he loved state censors because they tell him exactly what he should be making films about.
“The real danger is not in the books, but laughing off those who would ban them,” Judy Blume said in a 1999 commentary in the New York Times defending the work of fellow young-adult author J.K. Rowling” (p.37). Is there also a danger in attempting to reason with them? It seems that thinking that winning over someone with facts and reasons and “smarts” is coded as leftist, and just fuels the fire more. Censorship and bannings must be approached with editorials like this as well as an agenda (just like there is an agenda for why they are censoring).
The never-ending logic defense: “If evaluation of any literary work is permitted to be based upon requirement that each book be free from derogatory reference to any religion, race, country, nation, or personality, endless litigation respecting many books would probably ensue, dependent upon sensibilities and views of the person suing,” the court ruled (p172).
The higher moral calling defense: “While school boards may give special regard to local values, they may not ignore their obligation to respect a diversity of values” (p176).
School boards are ground zero for this stuff, and anyway you cut it, people are going to be unhappy. For me a lot of this stems from people thinking that “not backing down” means “you’re wrong and I’m right,” but the idea should be more about “I can hold two conflicting ideas within my head at once” (3).
As I Lay Dying was pulled from a school in 1986. Public meeting attendance was sparse. And by the time they cut the book loose, students had “finished the book anyway” and teachers were going to discuss it “even without it in student hands” (155). We must ally with our Learning and Language colleagues.
"Reading books containing gay themes doesn't make students gay, counselors say, and reading books containing straight themes didn't prevent them from becoming gay. Reading books in the former category instead let gay students know they were not alone" (p119).
Self-censorship and self-selection / Don't Tread on Me
If one is going to battle against censorship it is important for us to be looking at the ways in which I might be censoring access to information. It could be through self-selection, inherent biases, personal experience, or whatever, but to my mind if we don’t do it we can stand on a platform of anti-censorship.
Massachusetts and New England's progressive or tolerant coding sets up this "it couldn't happen here" mentality, yet Concord, MA (bourgeois) librarians refused to put Huckleberry Finn on the shelf calling it trash in 1885. In Amherst, MA in 1987, parents attempted to ban a history textbook that called Reconstruction policies "harsh" and failed to mention Columbus's enslavement of native Americans. Bobbit sets up examples to explore the idea of "Reflecting the Culture vs. Protecting Children From It".
It's important to consider how we are aligned with other school departments and community assets. One director of instruction pulled a book that was challenged despite the challenge not going any further-- a “didn’t want to make a big deal out of it” (98) mindset. Teachers in Florida quit after three years of battling over censorship issues, and winning. I'm also interested in how a One Book / One School program could be a form of censorship-- assigning of one book without choice. Also, it can be a focus for controversy.
Textbook publishing is a form of soft censor by creating a hegemony of ideas. This focuses on the idea of banning books deemed un-American. Definitions of that term are way too fuzzy, obviously, but when it comes to textbooks, the easiest way to sell them is to keep them vanilla: a heteronormative nuclear family always being portrayed as clean, happy, and the standard of correctness.
Horrifying and serious
Revelations abound about marginalized identities being outcast and targeted as a result of fervor around banning books involving characters that look like them could amplify feelings of hate. One defender of challenges found people were walking out of restaurants they went to and saw threatening graffiti on walls of public restrooms. A religiously motivated challenge saw gun violence and bombings.
"A local nurse defended (Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon), despite the unusual passage, claiming that it "showed black people in a human perspective with all the problems and emotions of genuine people...What it did was put a human face on African Americans...and that makes people nervous.'"" (p86)
Ironic hilarity
Book banning has resulted in people losing their jobs and (in one instance that Bobbit points out) localized gun violence. It’s important to look at some of the ironies of these situations though:
Bobbitt points out on pages 9 and 10 that the same identity-based hate that is so obvious in the book banning is an extension of an educator stereotype: we are weak because we are “incapable of ‘more important careers.’ More specifically, those parents believed that male teachers were probably gay and female teachers had chosen spinsterhood over more important roles as homemakers” (9-10).
And then there’s also the thing about trying to suppress something (like a book, or photos of celebrities as the case was in 2003 there this idea was invented: “The psychological term often used in these cases is the ‘Streisand Effect’” (29). Everyone wanted to see Barbara’s photos, and everyone wants to read Gender Queer and Lawn Boy now. There is another example in the book about about a textbook publishing company pulling a short story collection because they do not want controversy: textbook publishers bound by different motivations.
The medium is sending the message, McLuhan tells us. Often the message of content is easily grasped but the harder-to-assess message is coming from the medium. Books more violent than Squid Game are still more dangerous. People are verified of books. The same thing happened with Thirteen Reasons Why, which was turned into a Netflix series and then was pulled from shelves in Colorado after a rash of suicides. Book: published 2007, show: produced in 2017. “Removing it from the library shelves would be easier than getting a Netflix to cancel the series” (18).
There's a book that was banned because people were drinking daiquiris in it.
Displaying 1 of 1 review