Battle of the Book-Bans
Apparently, there is a crisis of book banning unfolding in schools across the country. At least, that is the story being pushed in a variety of media outlets. “Book Ban Efforts Spread Across the U.S.” warns an article in the New York Times. “Why Book Banning is Back” laments a piece at Vox. “A War on Books” screeches a headline in Education Week. Digging into these articles, one finds the same scenario rehearsed over and over again: parents across the country are agitating to have books censored and banned from use in the classroom, especially those texts that deal with issues of race and sexuality. Over and over again, the authors decry the alleged political motivations behind this organized effort to exclude various controversial texts from the classroom.
This whole hullabaloo is entirely disingenuous. Put aside the very obvious rejoinder that if the exclusion from the curriculum of controversial texts on race and sexuality is politically motivated, then their insertion into the curriculum in the first place was every bit as politically motivated. The fact is we have witnessed, over the last few years, a fanatical campaign to rid curricula across the country of the supposedly baneful effects of supposedly “racist” and “misogynistic” Western authors like Shakespeare and Homer, and this campaign has been carried out not by parents, but by educators themselves. It is beyond rich to listen to these same educators now complaining about attempts to ban the books they like, after advocating so strenuously for the banning of books they do not like. The most preposterous line might have been the one from a representative of the American Library Association, when she bemoaned the “chilling effect” of conservative calls for censorship, because they might “limit students’ exposure to great literature, including towering canonical works,” as though her colleagues have not been hard at work for some time imposing just such limits on America’s students.
Yet even pointing out the hypocrisy involved here does not come close to addressing the real issue. The processes through which curricula across this country have been all but deracinated of texts and subject matter once considered foundational have had nothing to do with censorship or book bans. Slowly but steadily, in department and curriculum committee meetings all over the country, decisions have been made by those invested with the power to make them to swap out classics from their students’ reading lists – authors like Shakespeare and Homer – for contemporary fare that addresses the range of modish topics now considered urgent. Dickens is exchanged for Junot Diaz. Readings of the Constitution replaced by readings of Howard Zinn. Aesthetic and historical criteria are tossed aside for considerations of identity: simple-minded accounting of how many women authors are represented on the reading list, how many minorities, and so on. No campaign to censor the old texts has been waged, and yet in classroom after classroom, they have been banished as effectively as if one had been.
In the abstract, this process is entirely legitimate. There is a limited amount of time in a student’s academic career to read; certain texts must be selected for study, others excluded. Over time, the texts that routinely get selected constitute a kind of canon. The dumbest arguments ever made were the arguments made a couple of decades ago against the idea of a canon. There is always a canon at work in education, just by nature of the enterprise; the only question is what that canon will look like. Those who are assumed to possess the professional competence to determine the reading requirements of students – those who are in charge of department and curriculum committee meetings – are rightfully entrusted with the power of selection over the texts that go to form a canon. So again, in the abstract, there is nothing illegitimate about the processes that have transformed the curricula of American schools over the last two or three generations.
But schools do not exist in the abstract. Those transformations cannot be adequately evaluated without reference to their content. We cannot determine whether the change from this to that was beneficial without considering the this and the that. Is time spent reading Not All Boys Are Blue as edifying to young minds as time spent reading Crime and Punishment? Does the history of the sexual revolution prepare students for fruitful political engagement as readily as the history of the Peloponnesian War? Would students learn as much from a parody of the American Founding, as contained in the 1619 Project, as they would from an examination of the real American Founding? The answers speak for themselves, and I would suggest that it is a matter of basic professional competence for an educator to be able to see this. I leave the reader to draw the proper conclusions from the fact that so many educators these days are not able to see this.
The matter becomes even more stark the moment we consider the content of the books supposedly being banned these days. Again, there is a great deal of disingenuousness surrounding this topic, as evidenced from quotes in the articles linked above about these texts merely aiming at the “establishment of a more diverse and inclusive society” and about opposition to them “laying the groundwork for increasing bullying, disrespect, violence and attacks.” In fact, most of the texts that have elicited the loudest protests are every bit as obscene and resentful as their opponents claim they are, and anyone who wishes can search online and verify the sordid truth for themselves. If there is a minimal set of qualifications for being an educator, certainly it must include an understanding of how inappropriate it is to place sexually explicit material in front of children, or to teach lessons that embitter one half the class against the other.
To discuss these issues always in terms of “book-banning” and “censorship” obscures the actual principles at stake, and the nature of the actual decisions being made about the content of our schools’ curricula. They are terms intended to conjure up historical memories of inquisitors and indexes of books, with lurid fantasies of theocratic oppression exercised in advance of either a leftist or a rightist agenda. They are part of a conceptual apparatus centered around principles like “freedom of expression” and “individual rights,” the very language that makes up the day to day political discourse of our society. But in the context of curriculum design, none of this conceptual apparatus makes sense. No one’s freedoms or rights are being impinged upon by the decisions educators make about what is appropriate for students to learn, and what is not. Books are selected, and those that are not selected are not being “banned” or “censored;” they are being excluded in preference for other books that more satisfactorily accomplish the pedagogical ends the instructors have at heart. All that matters – all that we should be arguing about – are the ends that determine the respective criteria for inclusion or exclusion of books, not the act of inclusion or exclusion itself.
In this respect, it is clear now that the ends which too many educators in our school system have at heart are blatantly partisan ends. The criteria they are applying to the selection of books have to do with those books’ capacity to inculcate into the minds of children the defining trait of the progressive mind, which is an obsession with matters of race and sexuality. The proper identities of authors and characters constitute their central concern, not the power of texts to help students grow morally and intellectually. In fact, the criteria being applied with greater and greater frequency to reading selections across the country have nothing to do with the students at all; they are about the educators, about their own biases and their desire to pass those biases along to their students. It is on these grounds, and not merely on the grounds that they exclude certain texts from the classroom, that contemporary educational trends should be condemned.
Yet in condemning the ideological criteria so preponderant in our schools, we obviously have a duty to propose better criteria for determining the content of curricula. Critics of current school reading lists show remarkably little interest in upholding this duty. Videos of confrontations between parents and school boards have become a kind of sub-genre over the last couple of years; one of the lines I have heard numerous times in those videos has been along the lines of, “schools are for teaching reading and writing, math and science – leave the teaching of values to us, the parents.” But such a nakedly utilitarian conception of what goes into a school curriculum would exclude Dostoyevsky and Dickens as surely as the most radically progressive one, since the only plausible justification for the inclusion of such authors is the power inhering in their work to realize moral and intellectual potentials in young people – ie, teach values. There is always some vision, explicit or subsumed, of what completes the human being that is at work in the construction of a course of study, so there are always some values that affect what texts get incorporated into that course of study. That opponents of the narrow and constricted vision currently at work in our schools believe the proper alternative is to exclude the effects of any vision at all suggests that our society has become almost entirely depleted of the spiritual and cultural resources required to educate our youth properly.
It is here that the inestimable value of the classical schooling movement is to be grasped and cherished. In a manner entirely unique in our times, those at work in classical schools have brought to the work of education a robust vision of what completes human nature, and what practices are required to elicit those potentialities out of a young soul. They go to their task with the steadfast insight that to teach the whole child – to truly realize the whole range of personality inhering in his or her burgeoning mind - is synonymous with inculcating virtue in that child. With this criteria – and this criteria alone – their books are selected, their curricula devised, and a course of study presented to young people that has its ends in their own proper development, and not in the achievement of their instructors’ ideological goals. That course of study entirely transcends the partisan divisions of the age, and offers parents of all political persuasions a viable model of schooling from which their children can benefit.
To acquaint oneself with the classical schooling movement – to visit their schools, to read their literature – is to get a sense of people who know what they are doing; of educators who have reflected seriously and extensively upon their craft, and who earnestly seek to share the fruits of that reflection in the classroom. Here at last are a group of educators who do indeed possess the competence to select texts appropriate for study, with a proper vision of the human person and his development at heart. Because they have not arrogantly rejected the wisdom of the past on account of its failure to anticipate the pieties of our age – because they have searched humbly through that wisdom to discover insights salutary to our times – classical educators have reclaimed the cultural and spiritual resources that are everywhere else in such short supply.
And that is why the promise of classical education lies not just in its power to transform our schools, but to transform our culture and our society. What the current book wars reveal is the endemic superficiality of our shared notions of the human person. What classical education offers by contrast is an opportunity for young people to return to sources from which they can derive rich and multifarious conceptions of personhood to serve as their shared heritage. In this, as in so many other ways, the classical school offers us a genuine source of hope for the future.