Censorship and Schools, 2004
Robert E. Crafton
Slippery Rock University
Member, NCTE Standing Committee Against Censorship

Rounding up the Usual Suspects

Bodily functions, human sexuality, homosexuality, profanity and/or racist speech, evolution, Satanism, witchcraft and the occult, unpopular political positions, and bad taste -- all the usual suspects -- have received their fair share of attention in schools and libraries in 2004. Books, t-shirts, and campaign posters, along with student newspapers and radio shows have all been targeted for expressing positions, exploring subjects, or using forms of language that some members of the community have found distasteful. A few cases in point:

Picture Books
Walter the Farting Dog, King and King, Eyewitness Horse Book:  A Wisconsin grandfather’s squeamish reaction to canine flatulence, general dismay in North Carolina at a young king finding a prince charming, and in Montana, objection to the suggestion that “It took 55 million years for the present family of horses, asses, and zebras to evolve from their earliest horse-like ancestor” (qtd. in “Censorship Watch,” American Libraries, May 2004) led to challenges and, in the case of King and King, the restriction of the book’s circulation.

Chapter Books and Young Adult Lit
Chris Lynch, Extreme Elvin; R.L. Stine, Double Date; Robie Harris, It’s Perfectly Normal and It’s So Amazing; Thomas Schouweiler, The Devil: Opposing Viewpoints; Natalie Babbitt, The Devil’s Storybook; and Judy Blume, Deenie:  “Teen social situations,” sex education, Satanism and the occult, a 12-year old girl discovering masturbation (among other things, to be sure) led parents in Texas, Florida, and New Jersey to complain, resulting in Elvin and Double Date being removed from circulation subject to review, to the movement of Harris’s sex-ed books from the young adult to the adult shelves in the public library, and to the requirement that students seeking to check out Deenie present permission slips signed by their parents.

Classroom Favorites
Of Mice and Men, Martian Chronicles, A Raisin in the Sun (all cited for profanity); Huck Finn, Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in LA, Roll of Thunder: Hear My Cry (racist language, depictions of racial violence); Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (sexual situations) all continued to be challenged. In 2003, the books or series most frequently challenged in public libraries included Phyllis Reynold Naylor’s Alice books, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Of Mice and Men, Michael A. Bellesiles’ Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, and Walter Dean Myer’s Fallen Angels (“Challenged and Banned Books”).

T-Shirts and Campaign Posters
Books are not the only targets. T-shirts continue to prove problematic:

• A Michigan high school student was suspended for five days for wearing a t-shirt sporting an anarchy symbol; he had been previously disciplined for wearing peace signs, upside-down American flags, an anti-war quote from Albert Einstein. Tellingly, “When Gies [the student] contended that he had a First Amendment right to express himself, one administrator informed him that the Constitution does not apply to Bay City students” (“Michigan School Reverses Student’s Suspension”).
• In Albemarle County, Virginia, a middle-school student was banned from wearing an NRA t-shirt with “silhouettes of a couple of rifles on it” (Edwards), a violation of school-board policy with regard to depictions of weaponry on clothing. The same policy, if strictly enforced, would also prevent the display of the state seal, which features a spear-toting woman, and the local high school’s seal, with its musket-equipped patriot.
• In Utah, the offending t-shirts advocated that “Queers Kick Ash,” part of an anti-smoking campaign aimed at gay and lesbian students, who, in fact, record higher rates of tobacco use than do their heterosexual peers, while in North Carolina, school officials removed two posters a candidate for student council president had hung in the school, one advocating a “Queer Eye for Hunt High,” the other proclaiming that “Gay Guys Know Everything.”
• In September, a New Castle, Pennsylvania, sixth grader was suspended for wearing an iron-on patch on the left side of his uniform shirt. The patch, which the student wore to commemorate the third anniversary of September 11, 2001, consisted of an American flag above the image of a white dove holding an olive branch in its beak (Shelenberger A1).
• In Webb City, Missouri, a gay student was twice disciplined, once on October 20 and again on October 27, for wearing t-shirts “bearing gay pride messages” (“ACLU Scolds”). While “bumper stickers in favor of Missouri’s recently-passed anti-gay marriage amendment [were] ubiquitous in the school’s hallways and parking lot,” the stickers sometimes displayed on notebooks and students’ shirts, the gay student was ordered to change his shirt, a Gay-Straight Alliance shirt from his former school in Fayetteville, Arkansas, because “someone might be offended by it.”  In fact, the student complied, exchanging shirts with a straight friend who wore the Gay-Straight Alliance shirt for the rest of the day without challenge.

Bad Taste
And finally, as always, bad taste provoked unfortunate responses at the University of Scranton and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. At the University of Scranton, the administration confiscated the April Fools’ Day edition of The Aquinas, fired the paper’s editors, and suspended the paper’s publication. According to USA Today, “The humor ranged from merely juvenile to outright offensive” (“Campus Censorship”). At the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, a student DJ was fired for a show “celebrating” Ronald Reagan’s death, the DJ’s response to what he felt to be the media’s overly positive portrayal of the Reagan administration. As reported in the Community CustomWire, the DJ said “he played requests such as ‘These Boots Are Made For Walking’ and told listeners he wanted to ‘walk over the newly laid dirt’ on Reagan's grave” (“Alaska School DJ Off Air”).

In general, none of these challenges, complaints, bans, disciplinary actions seems all that surprising; these are all the kinds of materials we are used to seeing challenged on campuses and in schools and public libraries, and for all of the reasons typically cited for these materials and actions being challenged. Celebrating a forlorn hound’s heroic flatulence or a young king’s alternative lifestyle choice in books written for children is just asking for trouble. Perhaps peoples’ continued ability to take offence at racially insensitive remarks, even in books that have been the subject of debate now for more than a century, should be admired. And yet, these kinds of responses do seem surprising. If nothing else, the phenomenal success of “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy” should have preempted challenges to the use of the word queer on t-shirts distributed by the GLBT Community Center of Utah or on posters by an openly gay candidate running for student government. Complaints about profanity in Of Mice and Men, number six on the ALA list of the 100 most frequently challenged books, seem something of a desperate rear-guard response. It’s hard to believe that people can continue to be offended by the use of some four-letter words.

Civic Education

It may seem perfectly obvious, especially in those cases where parents and grandparents have challenged schools and libraries to remove books from their curricula and shelves, but the offended parties in every case will appeal to the right of parents to determine the kind of education their children receive. And it is just as obvious that, while parents clearly have a right to determine what kind of education their children will receive, they have no right to make that decision for other families. Book selection is always a tricky business, turning on questions of budget, the age-appropriateness of the material, the literary quality or pedagogical value of the content, and the quality of the paper and binding, i.e. the production qualities of the book. On the other hand, selection decisions should not turn on whether the book includes frank descriptions of currently-held scientific theories or depicts the fictional exploits of adolescent wizards or tells the story of two young men falling in love and committing themselves to each other, i.e. subjects that might offend certain sensibilities.

Just as obvious here is that, implicit 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. Education is a civic enterprise, its goal to create an educated citizenry capable of participating in society. The question, of course, is just what kind of society we are talking about and how education can best serve the interests of that conception of society. What are the core values we are seeking to reproduce? 

While this sounds like a simple question, the answer is not as simple as it seems. The April 2004 issue of PS: Political Science and Politics, for instance, raised this question in a “symposium” on civic education. The six articles in the symposium focused on the teaching of civics per se, on courses relating to United States history and detailing the structure and functioning of the government, instruction devoted directly to imparting the knowledge and skills citizenship depends on. Insofar as all education is civic education, their discussion can be taken as one part of a more general consideration of the purposes of education, both K through 12 and at the undergraduate level.

The problem is that no clear consensus exists as to what the goals of a civic education are, beyond the need to create an effective, engaged, and educated citizenry. What it means to be a citizen, however, and how we can most effectively engage students in the important work of government remains a matter of debate, a debate that seems to pit patriotism against politics. In the first case, civic education, as Joel Westheimer describes it in his introduction to the symposium, is “primarily a means of conveying knowledge of important historical facts and a sense of civic unity, duty, and national pride to the Nation’s youth and young adults”(231). This is a 1950s conception of civics, that “Americans, while representing diverse backgrounds and cultures, are all part of a unified American creed or a common set of beliefs, and that these beliefs are easily identifiable”(232). For such people, Westheimer writes, “’what it means to be an American’ is more answer than question”(231). Moreover, such instruction is conceived of as being beyond politics, at least insofar as politics is defined by partisan or narrowly personal interests. By contrast, those educators supporting more political constructions of civic education see politics as “the process by which citizens with varied interests and opinions negotiate differences and clarify places where values conflict”(231). Civics courses should therefore “teach the critical and deliberative skills necessary to participate effectively in contentious public debates”(231), a model of citizenship that “recognizes ambiguity and conflict, that sees human conditions and aspirations as complex and contested, and that embraces debate and deliberation as a cornerstone of democratic societies”(231). E. Wayne Ross echoes these points in “Negotiating the Politics of Citizenship Education,” his contribution to the symposium:

The primary (and overlapping) tensions that have energized the field while simultaneously threatening its existence include: (1) the relative emphasis on the cultural heritage of the dominant society versus the development of critical thought; and (2) conflicting conceptions of citizenship, that is citizenship for social reproduction or social reconstruction. 

Rather than seeing one form of civic education as political and the other as apolitical, we need, as Westheimer suggests, to ask “Whose politics do civic education programs reflect and why?”(233). 

I have seen something of this debate playing out first-hand in my first-year composition course, particularly in the first and second units, which deal respectively with First Amendment issues and with the (inequitable) distribution of educational resources in the United States. The course focuses, in general, on research and argumentation, and the topics in these first two units are typically political, asking students to develop deliberated positions on issues like my state’s recent attempt to mandate the daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in all K-12 schools in the state, the proposed constitutional amendment outlawing flag desecration, the censorship of popular music, affirmative action, Title IX, bilingual education, or the accuracy of standardized tests. I teach in a state-supported school and my students are generally white. They were educated in rural and/or suburban public schools with typically homogenous student bodies, and are academically average, that is, our average SAT scores are just below the 50th percentile; approximately 25% are older, non-traditional students, and most students come from families of modest means. In many cases, these students are the first members of their families to attend college.  And their responses to the questions these units pose are increasingly conservative and, to a degree, contradictory. While students writing on music censorship rarely advocate stricter limits being imposed on the production and/or distribution of songs featuring graphic lyrics, an increasing number do believe that elementary and secondary students should recite the Pledge on a daily basis, and those writing on the flag desecration amendment by and large support its passage. These measures, they feel, are important steps to protecting and celebrating American values, and the arguments they produce are based on emotional appeals and first-person testimonials to the positive advantages of being American. In writing on educational issues, they are quick to dismiss standardized tests as accurate measures of academic ability, but just as quick to dismiss affirmative action, arguing that college admission decisions should be made on the basis of academic ability, measured by test scores and grades. Immersion in English-only classrooms typically wins out over bilingual language programs. Education for them is clearly about assimilation, about the acquisition of the dominant culture’s values, about being and learning to be “American.” 

My response to these issues and arguments is decidedly different. For me, flag desecration is a political act, a means of expressing a dissenting opinion, which is clearly in keeping with the revolutionary beginnings of the United States. The original intent of the First Amendment was, among other things, to protect the rights of citizens to speak out against governmental policies and practices with which they disagreed. And that -- the question of intent -- is the real issue:  What was the First Amendment originally intended to protect and will a proposed amendment allowing for the criminalization of flag desecration violate that original intent?  We need to listen to the testimony offered on both sides of the issue, but more than that, the decision needs to be informed by an independent inquiry into the historical purposes of the First Amendment and the ways the courts have interpreted First Amendment rights. The students need to be judicious in their decisions, which is very different from the exercise of common sense (and the ad populum arguments such appeals support) or from the emotional arm-waving (and the ad misericordium arguments) that often find their ways into their essays. These need to be deliberated positions.1  

Seen in this way, the patriotism/politics split noted in the PS symposium on civic education seems something of a false dichotomy. The right to hold and express a dissenting opinion has always been a central part of our cultural heritage. All education is civic education, its purpose to prepare active, engaged, educated citizens, which, in this case, seems to mean recognizing and protecting the pluralistic values and positions within the United States. And these are the values the Supreme Court has consistently recognized, in Texas v Johnson (which protected flag desecration), West Virginia v Barnette (against mandatory recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance), Tinker v DesMoines (protecting students’ First Amendment rights in school settings), or Island Trees v Pico (against the removal of books from a school library, books which members of the school board objected to). This is a part of our cultural heritage.

Not surprisingly, few of my students have heard of any of these decisions or have been asked to think in any meaningful way about First Amendment rights or about the purposes of education. Some students, in fact, will complain that they aren’t interested in politics, a fact more often than not borne out at the polls, given the poor voting records of the young. (The young, the less educated, and the poor historically tend not to participate in elections.) Civic education does seem to need some attention, and in a way that sees the critical examination of public issues as a part of one’s patriotic duty, an education where “what it means to be an American” is more question than answer, and not the reverse.

Keeping an open mind is key here. In Marion County, Florida, the library director removed Linda Jaivin’s Eat Me from circulation, an action that a former library trustee challenged on the grounds that the book complied with most of the library’s 17 selection criteria. The librarian restored the book to the shelves, noting that the “evenly distributed” response she had received in reaction to the book’s removal “emphasizes that there are differing views, interests, backgrounds, and motives within Marion County” (“Censorship Watch,” American Libraries, April 2004). Library collections, she noted, must reflect “variety, diversity, and inclusion rather than exclusion and doctrinal thinking.” Which is just the point. For every person who finds Walter’s farting or Deenie’s sexual discovery or the depiction of two young men kissing distasteful, there are as many more who find these stories amusing, instructive, helpful. These are things we need to talk about, which is why an Indiana father’s response to King and King seems so ironic. He asked to have the book removed from general circulation, as had been done in Wilmington, North Carolina, after his son read the book and asked why two men were kissing. In his complaint, the father wrote, “I had to tell him about the two men being gay, which is something we disagree with and not what God wants” (“Censorship Watch,” American Libraries, May 2004). To me, this seems like an appropriate response to this situation, the beginning of a longer conversation that will call on this father to articulate his beliefs and values for his son, a father and son in conversation, with something worth talking about.

Ross, in fact, argues that deliberation is central to civic education: “The way to assure that a pluralism of views on the nature and purpose of citizenship education remains beneficial and not factionalizing or destructive is to highlight deliberation as the core idea in creating, maintaining, and teaching for democracy.  The Deweyan sense of democracy seems most useful here, that is, democracy as a ‘mode of associated living, or conjoined communicated experience.’”  In English, we would call it a discourse community and see the formal study of rhetoric as the key to its creation.

Works Cited

“ACLU Scolds Missouri High School for Censoring Gay Student.” American Civil Liberties Union, October 28, 2004.
<http://www.aclu.org/news/NewsPrint.cfm?ID=16915&c=106>

“Alaska School DJ Off Air for Reagan Remark.”  Community CustomWire 11 June 2004. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost, Slippery Rock University Bailey Library, PA. 16 July 2004.
< http://voyager.ship.edu>

“Campus Censorship.”  USA Today 8 April 2004: 12a. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost, Slippery Rock University Bailey Library, PA. 16 July 2004.
< http://voyager.ship.edu>

“Censorship Watch.” American Libraries April 2004: 15. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost, Slippery Rock University Bailey Library, PA. 16 July 2004.
< http://voyager.ship.edu>

“Censorship Watch.” American Libraries May 2004: 17. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost, Slippery Rock University Bailey Library, PA. 16 July 2004.
< http://voyager.ship.edu>

“Challenged and Banned Books.” American Library Association 21 July 2004. <http://www.ala.org/bbooks/challeng.html>

Edwards, Bob. “Interview: Robert O’Neil Discusses the Jefferson Muzzle Awards.”  Morning Edition 13 March 2004. Academic Search Premier, EBSCOhost, Slippery Rock University Bailey Library, PA. 16 July 2004.
< http://voyager.ship.edu>

“Michigan School Reverses Student’s Suspension for Wearing ‘Anarchy’ T-Shirt.” American Civil Liberties Union 10 May 2004. Slippery Rock University Bailey Library, PA. 16 July 2004.
<http://www.aclu.org/StudentsRights/StudentsRights.cfm?ID=15672&c=159>

Ross, E. Wayne. “Negotiating the Politics of Citizenship Education.”  PS Online April 2004. Slippery Rock University Bailey Library, PA. 14 July 2004.
<http://www.apsanet.org>

Shelenberger, Jessica. “Families Challenge Uniform Policy.” New Castle News 21 Sept. 2004: A1.

Westheimer, Joel. “Introduction: The Politics of Civic Education.” PS Online April 2004. Slippery Rock University Bailey Library, PA. 14 July 2004.
<http://www.apsanet.org>