From the Editor
Fred Barton
Editor, SLATE Newsletter, and Region 4 Representative to the NCTE/SLATE Steering Committee

Gentle Readers:

I managed to miss most of the inauguration festivities, but I did hear that the two most popular words in the President’s speech were “freedom” and “liberty.” I would suspect that he was talking about everyone else’s freedom and liberty, but as you wind your way though this issue, it might be helpful to reflect on what these words have come to mean here at home, and more specifically, in our classrooms.

First, Robert Crafton conducts a guided tour through the year in censorship for us, from t-shirts to films to flatulent canines. Those who define “Free Speech” as "speech that agrees with me" are abroad in the land. There’s more at stake here than just the exclusion of a particular film, t-shirt, or book. As Dr. Crafton points out, …"[I]mplicit in these challenges, whether lodged by parents against books or school administrators against t-shirts, is a question of the purposes of education, whether the goal is to reproduce the attitudes and values prevailing within a community or to foster critical thought and reflection which might, in some cases, lead students to question these prevailing attitudes and values.” Dr. Crafton knows whereof he speaks. He is an assistant professor of English at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania and a member of NCTE's Standing Committee Against Censorship. He currently serves as Eastern Regent on the Board of Directors of Sigma Tau Delta, The International English Honor Society, representing the interests of chapters in the northeast quarter of the country, and has served in the past as chair of the National Association of Multicultural Education's Standards Committee.

From a general overview we move to a more personal account of teaching and censorship. Nicholas Karolides tells us how he came to realize that censorship is something English teachers live with every professional day. It’s a story I think we can all relate to, even if unlike Dr. Karolides, we have never come to the attention of the FBI. And if the name sounds familiar to you, yes, it is that Nicholas Karolides, winner of the 2002 NCTE Intellectual Freedom award, professor at the University of Wisconsin and author of an updated Encyclopedia of Censorship, due out this year.

Censorship is more than about ideas though. It can be about dreams too. Jacqueline Darvin, from the Department of Secondary Education & Youth Services at Queens College of the City University of New York, asks us to think about the implicit (and sometimes explicit) expectation that everyone goes to college and consider students whose dreams may lie along a different path. Students who desire to work with their hands also have minds and shouldn’t become afterthoughts simply because they don’t fit corporate America’s stereotype of what a student should be. She quotes Jonathon Kozol, who said, …”[T]his whole(School to Work) agenda is a targeted agenda, aimed at inner city kids who are believed to be incapable of higher academic work in universities and colleges. What we believe students are capable of is often what they become capable of. We can never forget that.”

Finally, I offer a rather dark rumination on the nature of childhood in this country. Perhaps it’s because I live in Michigan where we don’t see the sun from October to April, or perhaps it’s because I subscribe to one too many educational headline services. In any event, I believe we are planting seeds with our children that we will regret sowing in the future.