BANNING EDUCATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY

The new proposed elective course in African American Studies, as well as the 1619 project, and for that matter, books about all kinds of subjects from LBGTQ to African American history are being banned for the sake of protecting our children from knowing about differing points of view as well as factual history, or in order to protect them from feeling guilty about past and present discrimination.

I wonder how many of the people who are attempting to ban curriculum as well as books, know were the idea of giving tenure to teachers comes from. It was instituted to support free speech. It dates back to the 16th century to protect teachers from being fired or losing their heads for exposing students to ideas which differed from those of the rulers or religious leaders or politicians in power. There are today countries under authoritarian and/or religious rule which would ban courses and books they disagree with just like segments of our country are trying to ban the 1619 Project and the Black History and Culture course as well as a great many books. There are tenured teachers who fear for their jobs because they might teach, even accidentally something a segment of our population wants to eradicate from our culture. There are days when I wonder if I got transported to the Middle East in my sleep.

In 1988, my two teenage daughters went to see a new movie called Mississippi Burning. “How was it?” I asked. “Stupid,” they replied in unison. “They wanted us to believe people were being tarred a feathered,” a practice which by the way dates back to the 12th century, and was used in the US during colonial times as well as during the 19th and 20th centuries when it was used for the most part on Black people. “People in the theatre were laughing, it was so ridiculous,” my daughters reported. I was mortified and angry at myself, and at an educational curriculum that spared them the knowledge of how Black people have been treated in this country for centuries. When they learned the truth, they were shocked and horrified, and probably better understood the anger people whose relatives and ancestors were subjected to that treatment may feel, but they did not take responsibility or engage in self-flagellation. The experience did not damage their psyches, any more than my practicing hiding under my desk in elementary school in case the Russians would attach, prevented me from visiting Russia as an adult, or hearing the racist comments or sexist jokes of my parents and grandparents have made me racist or sexist, and I do not feel guilty for their ignorance.

In the TV shows I watched as a child, Indians were the bad guys; Cowboys and our military were the good guys. There was no mention of the “Trail of Tears,” when approximately 100,000 indigenous people were forcibly removed from their homes and their land and herded like cattle hundreds of miles, incurring about 15,000 deaths in their relocation. Nor was there any mention of Japanese American citizens living in the US being taken from their homes and placed in internment camps in 1942 after Pearl Harbor, nor the Spanish inquisition where the Catholic Church tortured people for that matter. We know about the current targeting of Asian people by some who blame China for the COVID pandemic. Will that reality and police brutality, and pedophilia in the Catholic Church, and mass shootings (assuming we correct those horrors) be suppressed from the education of those yet to be born? In my youth, there was mention of our heroic and brilliant technological advancement in atomic energy, and our heroic use of the bombs which destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and slaughtered their people in order to end WWII. Does learning about the reality of these things make me feel guilty or beat myself up. No! I feel angry about the information and awareness I was deprived of in school and I am determined to champion accurate and compassionate history in our schools.

I was in college when we stopped banning authors like DH Lawrence’s (The film, Women in Love was released in 1969 – a beautifully sensuous, true to Lawrence piece; Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1988 and a remake in 20022) If you have not read Mark Twain’s banned Diaries of Adam and Eve; it’s a must read. I got to study 1984, and Of Mice and Men and The Catcher in the Rye and dozens of other formerly banned, now classics in college and I taught some of them in high school.

There are places where words matter: changing from girl to woman, and boy to man had a positive impact in nudging cultural norms in a positive direction. “Black Live Matter,” should have had a similar impact, but unfortunately it was misunderstood as was “defund the police” and both met backlash. “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe," did not say “catch a tiger by the toe.” It was appropriate to remove the racist word from that chant because it served no purpose.

Most books have desirable and undesirable content. It is not appropriate to eradicate racism from Tom Sawyer, for example because Tom’s relationship with Jim in contrast with the culture of the time is an important theme of the story. That’s not to say no book should ever be banned or language altered, but we need to ask ourselves if in all the word changing and banning going on today, we are putting our energy in the right place.

A friend once confided in me that her 12 yr. old son had copies of Play Boy under his bed; neither she nor the school had given them to him. She guessed he wasn’t in too much trouble because when she confronted him, he complained about the spelling errors. I look my children to see some R rated movies because I knew they would be exposed to them anyway, and if I was with them, I could inject my point of view. If they saw or heard about the movies alone, I had no influence. My point is that we as parents need to not abdicate our responsibility to indoctrinate our children to school or church or anywhere else. Children will be exposed to people who have ideas that are different from what they get at home.

My grandson graduated from High School last year, so he was not subjected to today’s ban on books! He understands about various sexual orientations; all that knowledge is doing in his case is normalizing a reality. I’m not sure gay for him is much different from having brown or blue eyes or being Catholic or Jewish. The existence of Black History and Native American History were not withheld from him, and he does not seem to be beating himself up for being white.

If parents want their kids to think LBGTQ people are sinful or perverted, they will indoctrinate them at home. If the kids get exposed to explicit sexual information at too young an age, they will be disgusted and grossed out like my daughter was when an older playmate told her about getting her period. People who want their kids to grow up without empathy for those who have suffered in the past will easily assure their children that we are not responsible for what our ancestors did. And, for those who was to suppress history, there are other schooling options: Church schools indoctrinate their pupils with ideas not taught in public schools and private school offer alternatives. I’m sure private or charter schools will come into being to serve the backlash, and whole communities do home schooling to avoid exposure to public school .

We need to ask ourselves if in all the word changing and banning, we are putting our energy in the right place. I think we are wasting the time of educators who could be helping kids who have fallen behind because of COVID instead of nitpicking books that have been in the hands of children for decades. Please let’s not repeat the stupidity of the past; let’s not have teachers who are afraid to teach and empty library shelves. Let’s allow our public schools to give our children a broad range of options of books to read.