A Soothing Reprieve

To counter the endless onslaught of bad news, I have made a conscious effort to seek out and notice any good news. One source is the What Could Go Right newsletter and podcast from the Progress Network, which brightens my day.

So I’ve decided to start collecting good news about issues I’ve been blogging about. Here are some encouraging stories.

Responses to Book Banning

  • Library commissioners in Llano County, Texas, voted to keep its three-branch system open after officials had threatened to close the libraries after right-wing protests about their content. The commissioners had removed a number of books based on a single complaint, then dissolved the current library board and replaced it with book banning advocates including the complainant. When other residents won their lawsuit calling for the books’ return, the county considered closing the libraries pending the suit’s resolution. But, “Under intense scrutiny, the commission blinked. Its leader acknowledged feeling pressure from ‘social media’ and ‘news media’” (washingtonpost.com).
  • The Brooklyn Public Library is providing free access to its entire catalog of 500,000 digital books to anyone aged 13 to 21 anywhere in the country as a response to book banning. Youth receive an electronic membership card that doesn’t require parental approval. In the last year, the library has registered more than 6,000 teens in all 50 states, and they’ve already checked out over 70,000 books. Their press officer says, “That’s a wonderful thing, because it means that we’ve provided 6,000 more teens access with books and information. But it’s also a heartbreaking thing, because it means 6,000 teens need it” (fastcompany.com).
  • The Bluest Eye is back on high school shelves in Pinellas County, Florida. Florida HB 1467 lists the felony charges for school librarians could face if they allow any books that are pornographic or harmful to minors. The superintendent banned this book because one parent made an informal complaint about a rape scene in it. Last month seven district media specialists decided to make the book available in district library media centers for high school students with no parental permission required, and teachers will be able to use the book in their classrooms provided they follow district policy on controversial materials, which calls for parental consent and alternative options (tampabay.com).

A Response to Learning Loss from the Pandemic

  • Atlanta, Georgia, has added thirty minutes of classroom instruction per day for three years to help students catch up. Some elementary teachers have moved up each grade with their students to give them a head start every fall (Chicago Tribune 4/23/23p. 5).

A Response to the Teacher Shortage

  • The University of Wisconsin has just extended its Teacher Pledge program to help reduce the severe teacher shortage. UW pays the equivalent of in-state tuition and fees in exchange for teaching in a Wisconsin PK_12 school for three to four years after graduation. 556 students have taken the Teacher Pledge, and 226 Pledge alumni are now teaching in classrooms around the state of Wisconsin (wisc.edu).

Social Media and Education

  • Two judges in Kane County, Illinois [where we live] have developed an hour-long presentation geared toward middle school students that explores the harmful and potentially criminal effects of cyber bullying and sexting. They’ve presented the program in Kane County and in Chicago and hope to expand it (Kane County Connects 8/23/22).
  • Huntley, a northwestern small town in Illinois, has launched a new platform for students and parents “to report instances of bullying, mental health concerns and unsafe situations in schools.” Those who reach out will be connected to staff in real-time, allowing two-way communication and providing students with easy access to staff for help (huntley158.org).

Student Activism

  • Two students in northern Illinois suburbs have joined forces to get bills passed to expand history course to include Asian Americans and indigenous Americans. They have been working with state legislators, and Illinois passed the Teaching Equitable Asian American History Act in July 2021, the first state in the nation to require public schools to teach Asian American History. Now they are working with students in Washington, New York and New Jersey — trying to get similar bills passed in those states and on the federal level (dailyherald.com).
  • Chicago Public Schools students who are members of the Chicago Chess Foundation travel to Ghana to hold competitions for Ghanian students and build cross-cultural understanding. They’re already planning a return next year and hope to bring Ghanian students to the United States (Chicago Tribune 4/30/23 p. 4).

We need to find these nuggets and celebrate them – not all the news is bad these days. This is my gift to you!

Hypocrisy Is Winning

The same parents arguing that they should control what their children read and learn want to control what all children read and learn; they will not accord other parents the same rights they’re fighting for. That’s complete hypocrisy!

As a teacher, I have always supported parents who want to be involved in their own children’s education. When some of those parents expressed concerns over book choices and curriculum, I worked with them. I remember a parent’s apprehension over the suicides in Romeo and Juliet given the death of her son’s older brother by his own hand. I offered alternatives. In the end, however, assured that we would talk about the tragic foolhardiness of the two protagonists’ making such an irrevocable choice, she chose to let him participate and made sure to follow up with conversations at home. I felt good about that whole experience.

I do not support the banning of books and courses or the rewriting of books. I find the present push by parents and parent groups to make decisions not just for their own children but for everyone else’s children both unfathomable and unacceptable.  If teachers and schools afford those parents a role in their own students’ education, who are they to deny other parents the same option? Yet the current push to rewrite and/or forbid different works (and even entire courses, like Florida’s response to the AP course in African-American history) would deny others the very freedom those parents are seeking. That’s wrong.

Emily Style, founding Co-Director of the national SEED Project (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity) describes curriculum as a window and a mirror: “education needs to enable the student to look through window frames in order to see the realities of others and into mirrors in order to see her/his own reality reflected. Knowledge of both types of framing is basic to a balanced education which is committed to affirming the essential dialectic between the self and the world” (wcwonline.org). While she supports parents’ involvement for their own children, she writes, “I draw the line, however, at their insisting that their values, which limit the perspectives their children can consider, must be universal. Parents who want their children to understand history as it really occurred should have equal rights” (nationalseedproject.org).

This push for censorship and control not only limits rights of families who think differently, but it cripples our ability to understand and learn. “The possibility of a more just future is at stake when book bans deny young people access to knowledge of the past” (theatlantic.com). Our students will face a global context; they will live and work with people of varied perspectives. Our nation needs these students to be better prepared for that context. The philosopher George Santayana wrote, ““Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” If our youth study a fully sanitized history, how will they learn from the past in order to forge a better future? If any potentially offensive terms are cleansed from books, how will they fully understand the past? “With lessons from the past, we not only learn about ourselves and how we came to be, but also develop the ability to avoid mistakes and create better paths for our societies” (mooc.org).

Furthermore, this push to limit access to multiple perspectives and to address unsavory realities of our shared history comes from a minority of parents that would force their views on all others. A 2022 Harris poll showed just 12% of respondents wanted books on divisive topics banned, and upwards of 70% of Americans, including both Democrats and Republicans, oppose such bans (Time.com). “In the name of vindicating their ‘rights,’ parents with special interests are pursuing tactics that the overwhelming majority of parents and citizens reject” (Ibid.).

So will we continue to allow minority rule to limit our options?

These arguments apply not only to the choice and availability of books, but to the revision of books as well. Megan McCardle reminds us that the sanitized version of Shakespeare’s work by Thomas Bowdler, the version that removed all profanity, was for a time the best-selling version until people realized what great writing had been removed. She calls Inclusive Minds’ revisions of works by Roald Dahl “lobotomies”; instead, we should “give children a window into the real past, as the people living there saw it, rather than compress their reading material into an eternal now. If our moral ideas are so self-evidently correct (and to be clear, I think that in many cases they are), then it should be easy to train children to recognize the past’s mistakes” (washingtonpost.com). Washington Post books columnist Ron Charles acknowledges the value in Aunt Jemima’s syrup losing its racist icon and Dr. Seuss books losing offensive illustrations but writes, “The absolutist position against tinkering with dead authors’ works is generally the best one. And right-wing efforts to ban swaths of stories about Black Americans and LGBTQ+ people make all efforts to ‘fix’ literature sound sinister” (Washington Post Book Club newsletter 2.24.23). PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel warns that “[r)ewriting novels — like efforts to rewrite history — has origins in authoritarian playbooks. We need to learn from the perspective of the past, not eliminate viewpoints we no longer accept” (Ibid.). She urges us to support children’s development of autonomy and critical thinking, to help them test their own opinions and beliefs.

This concerted effort to cleanse both libraries and curricula along with individual books has librarians and educators fearful and uncertain. “Over the past three academic years, legislators in 45 states proposed 283 laws that either sought to restrict what teachers can say about race, racism and American history; to change how instructors can teach about gender identity, sexuality and LGBTQ issues; to boost parents’ rights over their children’s education; to limit students’ access to school libraries and books; to circumscribe the rights of transgender students; and/or to promote what legislators defined as a ‘patriotic’ education”[washingtonpost.com2). Teachers find themselves self-censoring and restricting what they say “about race and the darker parts of U.S. history” (Ibid.). At least 160 educators have already resigned or lost their jobs because of fights over the appropriateness of instruction on race, history or LGBTQ issues (washingtonpost3). Armed individuals terrorize school board meetings, while librarians face harassment and threats (Ibid.). Hannah Allen of The Washington Post warns:

The goal, extremism monitoring groups say, is to spread the ideology at the grass-roots level by taking on — or taking over — school boards, city councils, sheriff’s departments and other local institutions. In the case of libraries, they say, book bans are only a first step, followed now by legislation to weaken librarian control over collections, moves to strip libraries of legal protections and, in some examples, efforts to defund libraries altogether (Ibid.).

Adults who demand wholesale banning of books and rewriting of offensive passages in a desire to protect their own children cripple the learning of all children. Books like Maus, a graphic Holocaust novel that “show readers how personal prejudice can become the law. The irony is that in banning books that make them uncomfortable, adults are wielding their own prejudices as a weapon, and students will suffer for it” (theatlantic.com2). It is time for the rest of us to support not only the rights of these parents, but also our own. We must demand the same respect for our values that they demand for theirs and end this tyranny of the minority. Only then can we hope to raise enough citizens with an understanding of multiple perspectives and the chance to live well in an ever more diverse and challenging world.