Recently, I have quit worrying about censorship. Instead, I worry a great deal about the effects our new information marketplace is having on the curriculum we offer our children. Of course, attempts are still made to limit what we read in our public libraries and what material we choose for our classrooms. Every year, we reexamine The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to discover we still are uncomfortable with racial issues. Yet, I believe that those with powerful interests to commodify knowledge have long understood that traditional censorship does not produce the same benefit that controlling the knowledge market does. They are little concerned with how their control negatively impacts the children who receive their curriculum.
I view our contemporary response to censorship as an action constructed from Victorian ideology. Back in the late 1800s business leaders opened up a laissez faire economy while at the same time domesticating the cultural scene. To truly illustrate this Victorian social phenomenon requires reviewing a number of book-length culture studies, but suffice it to say that these radical men gave us not only more cheap commodities than we could imagine but also such cultural constructs as home economy, literature classes, the Boy Scouts, and the art museum.
This was the time T. S. Eliot writes about in The Wasteland. His father, Henry Ware Eliot, went bankrupt in a partnership producing acetic acid for St. Louis’ white lead companies. Later, he made a fortune as chairman of the Hydraulic-Press Company supplying bricks to burgeoning, industrial St. Louis, all the while serving on the Board of Directors of Washington University when the Board founded the St. Louis Museum of Fine Arts (Eliot 3). Henry Ware Eliot belonged to a class of men who promoted revolution in industry but demanded classical truth and beauty at home. Exemplifying the censorship reflex of the Victorian age, T. S. Eliot’s mother, Charlotte, in a letter to Bertrand Russell, wrote, “Mr. Eliot [Henry] remarked when he saw a copy [of Blast, an avant-garde magazine edited by Wyndham Lewis and supported by Ezra Pound] he did not know there were enough lunatics in the world to support such a magazine” (Eliot 131). Although few of us think of ourselves as Victorian, I think we attack censorship as if our parents besmirched our favorite literary production.
I give credit to the Reagan administration for pulling the FCC’s and FTC’s eyeteeth and creating a laissez faire cultural scene. We all know that anything goes now, the control transferred from the government to our electronic remote. Before the Reagan administration, electronic broadcast stations needed to prove to the FCC that they were a public service, earning the privilege to use the public airwaves. The Reagan administration waved away this tradition, replacing it with a free market where information is a commodity whose distribution is controlled by market forces.
In this brave new Reaganite world, parents view schools less as a place where their children discover truth and beauty and more as a place of safety from the onslaught of prurient and violent messages used as a vehicle for selling other commodities. Given the nature of our information free market, parents come to our schools feeling threatened. In my experience, the battle is not over whether the school curriculum is false or ugly but over whether the school curriculum only mirrors the information free market.
Because the nature of information exchange has changed, I believe we need to formulate new responses both to the information commodities available to us and to the information that has gone out of circulation. For example, more than one textbook salesperson with whom I’ve spoken has proudly promoted their glossy, colorful, multi-activity, multi-intelligence, fully integrated, fully supported, fully supplemented program as an extension of MTV. We become just as easily lost in the complexity of choices found in the new textbook programs as we are in the information free market, but as parents are telling us, a plethora of choices doesn’t raise a child. We as educators, and as parents, need to develop frameworks for analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information commodities so that we can again feel safe about our curriculum.
Just as important, we need to develop strategies, search engines, and networks for finding the information that our free market has deemed unprofitable. For example, I have been asked this year to teach in a Grade 10, English/World Cultures block program. Finding myself without appropriate literature, I thought it would be easy to find $10-15 Asian and African readers. My district cannot afford the $70 world literature textbook programs. I contacted my state language arts, reading, and social studies specialists; local librarians; and both NCTE’s “Ask a Question” and “MultiCLitIns (NCTE’s Multicultural Literature Instruction electronic discussion list).” I was shocked by how hard it was to find what little existed to meet the reading needs of my students.
I believe that if we put more energy into providing frameworks for analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating our information commodities, parents would be less likely to use the outmoded censorship strategy to quell their fears. I also believe that we need to develop networks and partnerships for finding and exchanging scarce information products. I wonder if American schools can more often become a place where parents and educators come together to resist the commodifying of knowledge. Only in this way can curriculum be exclusively for our children.
Work Cited
Eliot, Valerie, ed. The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Volume 1 1898-1922. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 1988.
Jeffrey Dunn has taught high school English for twenty-five years in both private and public schools and holds a Ph.D. in English Literature and Culture Studies from the University of Pittsburgh.
