Culture Wars – Dare to Teach and Learn

The Culture Wars: A Harmful Distraction

Politicians and other public figures continue to push the culture wars as a distraction instead of focusing on solving the very real problems facing our schools and communities. Their actions cause harm while preventing the kind of collaborative problem-solving we so urgently need. All of us must speak up.

The American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) reported 695 attempts to censor library materials and services and documented challenges to 1,915 unique titles in just the first eight months of 2023. The number of unique titles challenged has increased by 20% from the same reporting period in 2022, a year that had already shattered censorship records. Challenges to books in public libraries accounted for 49% of documented challenges, compared to 16% during the same reporting period in 2022. Challenges by a single person or group demanding the removal or restriction of multiple titles dominate, with over 90% of the overall number of books challenged included as part of an attempt to censor multiple titles.

“These attacks on our freedom to read should trouble every person who values liberty and our constitutional rights, said Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. “To allow a group of people or any individual, no matter how powerful or loud, to become the decision-maker about what books we can read or whether libraries exist, is to place all of our rights and liberties in jeopardy” (uniteagainstbookbans.org).

Libraires themselves are under attack. “Some libraries have received bomb threats; others are at risk of having their funding slashed, or even face closure, over disputes about book removals. In some instances, librarians have been harassed, threatened and called groomers and pedophiles” (nytimes.com).

According to PEN America, the movement to ban books is driven by a vocal minority demanding censorship despite a 2022 poll showing that over 70% of parents oppose book banning. PEN counted book removals in school and classroom libraries during the 2022-2023 school year and found 3,362 cases of books being removed, a 33 percent increase over the previous school year. More than 1,550 individual titles were targeted. Many of the same books are challenged around the country, including classics by Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood, and contemporary young adult fiction by popular authors like John Green. “The most dramatic spike in book bans took place in Florida, which removed more than 1,400 books and surpassed Texas as the state with the highest number of removals, according to PEN. Florida emerged as a hot spot for book challenges after the state passed several laws aimed in part at restricting educational and reading material on certain subjects. As school districts scrambled to comply with the new regulations earlier this year, some teachers and librarians removed entire shelves of books” (pen.org).

Free speech advocates worry that some school districts will further limit book access by suspending new book purchases or avoid stocking books on topics that might be viewed as controversial. “The way it’s going to begin to manifest may look different,” said Kasey Meehan, the lead author of PEN’s report. “We’ll begin to see this chilled atmosphere play out in different ways, either through quietly removing books, or not bringing books in, in the first place” (nytimes.com).

The novelist Nora Roberts responded to the decision of a Martin County, Florida school to purge eight of her novels based on the complaints of a single member of the conservative group Moms for Liberty: “All of it is shocking…If you don’t want your teenager reading this book, that’s your right as a mom — and good luck with that. But you don’t have the right to say nobody’s kid can read this book.” The very same parents who want their parental rights protected too often would do so by denying those rights to other parents (washingtonpost.com).

Alexi Giannoulias, Illinois Secretary of State and State Librarian, recently testified to a Senate Judiciary Committee, “Our democracy depends on a marketplace of ideas [that] will not function if we ban books, because we will be banning ideas and preventing our children from thinking for themselves and having the ability to debate and learn and understand different perspectives” (chicagotribune.com). But even in Illinois books are being removed. The Yorkville school board removed the book Just Mercy from the curriculum, deeming it inappropriate and upsetting for teens. This book explores issues in the American justice system and should promote meaningful discussion. I’m proud of Yorkville High School senior Alexis Barkman. She said, “By allowing the opinions of a select few to influence what is taught in our classrooms, you’re sending the message that their beliefs are more important that the quality of our education. You’re depriving us of our freedom to read and form our own opinions about the subjects you deem too controversial” (shawlocal.com).

Such behavior for political purposes is offensive to me. Look at a Missouri candidate for governor, State Senator Bill Eigel. A long-shot at best, he very publicly used a flamethrower to set cardboard boxes on fire. Eigel said he would burn books he found objectionable, and that he’d do it on the lawn outside the governor’s mansion. Later he claimed this was all a metaphor for how he would attack “the woke liberal agenda” (chicagotribune.com). Is this dangerous stunt more important than the key issues defined by Missouri University Extension: economic opportunity, educational access and workforce preparedness, and health and wellbeing (muextensionway.missouri.edu)? Of course not.

And books aren’t the only front line. The United States Senate is arguing over a dress code even as the nation faces a likely government shutdown and its consequential impact. A black student in Texas just filed a federal civil rights lawsuit because his high school disapproves of his dreadlocks even though he ties them up on his head to meet school requirements (chicagotribune.com). When we continue to face an achievement gap for students of color and a school-to-prison pipeline, is this really our priority?

Heidi Stevens, my favorite Chicago Tribune columnist, said it best: “Stop pretending book bans are about sex… Stop pretending we can solve the most pressing, dire issues of our time – the climate crisis, the opioid overdose epidemic, gun violence, the recent doubling of childhood poverty – the mental health crisis among young people – without including all sorts of voices, stories, perspectives, ideas, experiences, and wisdom in public discourse and policy making” (www.chicagotribune.com). Please heed her call to action and reach out to your elected officials.

A Brave New World?

Chat GPT concerns continue to escalate, and the industry is moving very quickly. Google is about to release Bard, its own AI chat, which Google will not only release to the public for free but also begin using to generate search results. Just today Microsoft “said it would ‘reimagine’ its Bing search engine with technology mirroring the model from ChatGPT creator OpenAI” [washingtonpost.com]. Even as articles warning of disaster from AI multiply, innovators are suggesting way to use AI productively. I will write more about this, but right now I feel an urgency about sharing a recent Washington Post article.

Entitled “Hide your books to avoid felony charges, Fla. Schools tell teachers” it describes the impact of Florida House Bill 1467, passed last July, which “mandates that schools’ books be age-appropriate, free from pornography and ‘suited to student needs’” [washingtonpost.com2]. The new law requires qualified school media specialists who have undergone a state training program to approve all books in the school library and in the classroom. Because that training didn’t occur until last month, the law’s impact is now causing teachers to strip their bookshelves of books or cover them with paper.

Because an older Florida law makes the distribution of “harmful materials” to minors a third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in prison and up to a $5,000 fine, these new rules have a chilling effect on book selection and student access. A spokeswoman from the Florida Department of Education warned that teachers who violate the law may face penalties on their teaching certificates as well. And “because of uncertainties around enforcement and around what titles might become outlawed, school officials have warned teachers that their classroom libraries may expose them to the stiffest punishments” [Ibid.].

At least two counties, Manatee and Duval, have already directed teachers to remove or wrap up their classroom libraries. Many educators and teachers have expressed outrage. Students have shared their frustration as well. According to Broward School Board member Sarah Leonardi, Florida “is a state that seeks to limit access to knowledge and resources that don’t fit in a conservative ideological box. … It is a state that is making it more and more difficult to educate or parent a child without constant fear of retribution” [news4jax.com].

This initiative is chilling for so many reasons. As a teacher, I believe my responsibility is to develop critical thinking skills. How can students think critically if they aren’t exposed to multiple ideas? As an educator I feel great concern over the burnout and frustration of those currently in the classroom, especially when we already can’t fill all those shoes and when the pipeline of new teachers is grossly inadequate. How can we expect teachers to do their jobs well when we keep threatening them and questioning their professionalism? As a co-founder of my school district’s Gay Straight Alliances and of the Illinois Safe Schools Alliance, I fear for the well-being of sexually minority youth when their resources are among those being removed. How will they manage without support?

I come to this with a clear bias. My parents allowed me to read anything as long as I would talk about it with them. When I outgrew the Cherry Ames series and other books in the children’s department of our library, they helped me get an adult card when I was still in grade school. I read Nevil Shute’s On the Beach and William Saroyan’s The Human Comedy well before my teens. Was I traumatized? I was growing up during the panic over bomb shelters, and Shute’s novel gave me a way to discuss fear of the apocalypse with my parents. Saroyan fed my curiosity about the human condition and dealing with loss. And when I took a paperback considered racy back then [though pretty benign by today’s standards] on a sleepover and finished it that night, my girlfriend asked to read it. Her mother sent it back to my mother in a plain brown wrapper, clearly appalled. My mother’s reaction: “Everyone has to make their own decisions about what’s appropriate. You did nothing wrong, but she has every right to decide differently for her daughter.” I still support that vision.

As an English teacher, I always offered alternatives when parents expressed concerns, but I do believe that students should be exposed to a variety of ideas so they can make their own evaluations. Depriving students and teachers of books that foster critical thinking is backwards. I wonder how many of the books I so loved teaching, precisely because they challenged student’s understanding of the status quo and provoked thought and discussion, will pass the test in Florida. Will students miss books like Catcher in the Rye because of its profanity and references to sex? Or Lord of the Flies because it reveals undesirable human tendencies? Fahrenheit 451 or Animal Farm because they show the dangers of authoritarian governments? To Kill a Mockingbird because of its portrayal of systemic racism? Beloved or The Color Purple because of the current backlash against “anti-racism”? How do we teach The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn responsibly without exploring Twain’s use of the n-word and whether his treatment of Jim is racist. Each of the books included above has been challenged repeatedly. Each of these books was also a critical piece of my curricula as I worked to help students explore and navigate a world bigger than the one they knew.

Banning books is not new. This level of control, however, frightens me. We cannot have an educated populace equipped to make good decisions and deal with the evolving challenges and changes in our country and in the world. These culture wars will destroy our culture if we don’t fight back.

Is It Already Too Late?

I fear for the future of public education in this nation. These forces fuel my angst:

Students, teachers, parents and administrators are dealing with lost learning and lost connections from the pandemic.
Public support for education seems less reliable. From my first teaching experience in 1970 until my retirement, I saw a shift from teachers almost always being right to teachers almost always being wrong, neither of which seems right to me. The assault on teachers’ choices and on school board decisions suggests an us-you dynamic instead of collaborative support.
Micromanaging public education by non-educators has become a costly epidemic. From the days of “No Child Left Behind” to now, legislators have been setting rules and guidelines that may not align with known “Best Practices” and that disempower teachers and teacher decision-making.
People using the “culture wars” for their own political purposes are polarizing communities and hurting support for schools. They are robbing schools and educators of decision-making, hamstringing their ability to teach students to think and learn.
Critical thinking, perhaps the most important life skill schools should nurture, cannot be taught without exploring more than one side of an issue. Unfortunately, too often today adults want kids to parrot their beliefs instead of developing their own.

I hold core values that matter here:

All students can learn given good teachers and appropriate materials and lessons. One size has never fit all, and well-trained teachers are best equipped to figure out how to reach a wide array of students.
Educators have a moral responsibility to nurture students thinking, especially critical thinking. We seem to be living in a time when many don’t value critical thinking, when many adults want students to toe their line of thinking instead. How can we solve the great problems facing our world if we can’t think about them openly and explore possibilities collaboratively?
Educators can – and should – be responsive to parental concerns about curriculum on a case-by-case basis, thereby honoring their family values without dictating them to everyone else. When I had a parent concerned about controversial content, I could offer alternatives without the entire class being deprived of an important experience or exposure to ideas.
Educators, especially when they work in teams and have their curricula evaluated by their administrations and boards of education, are by far the most qualified to develop curricula. Teachers have been trained to evaluate material and put it in a meaningful context. Working in teams, they are best suited to identify what is appropriate and provides an opportunity for learning.
Winston Churchill [and/or George Santayana] supposedly said, “Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” How can we teach history from which we can learn valuable lessons if we continue to sanitize it and dismiss uncomfortable past realities?

I knew I wanted to spend my life teaching and learning by the time I was in sixth grade, and I loved my career most of the time. Now, though, I’m less convinced that I would choose it. The politics in Florida may be among the more extreme, but their policies are catching on in other states. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s “Stop WOKE Act” regulates what schools can teach about race and identity [washingtonpost.com]. Although the law is currently being challenged in court, it should still strike fear in proponents of public education. Critics warn that the efforts in Florida are a harbinger for other states [Ibid.]. “’Florida may be leading the charge,’ said Fairfield University mathematics professor Irene Mulvey, the president of the American Association of University Professors, adding that Texas is not far behind and that many other states are following suit. ‘It’s a trend in the larger culture wars … where you see these politicians trying to throw red meat to the base and stir people up’” [Ibid.].

Florida is trying to control every aspect of education and to focus on a sanitized and Christian worldview. “The DeSantis administration has decried teachings on race, suggested civics instruction that downplays the historical separation of church and state, told school districts to ignore advice from the federal government that guarantees civil rights protections for LGBTQ students and, on Wednesday, asserted that children in elementary schools are being told they are the wrong gender” [washingtonpost.com]. The vagueness of the rules and the conflicting instruction from the state and federal governments are sowing fear and confusion. According to Michael Woods, a Palm Beach teacher and member of the Classroom Teachers Association, “’The vagueness of these laws is doing exactly what it was intended to do. It’s silencing teachers… I have grown people coming up to me worried about what they can say’” [Ibid.].

Florida also requires new civics training for public school teachers that includes the statement that it is a “’misconception’ that “the Founders desired strict separation of church and state’” [washingtonpost.com]. This flies in the face of the First Amendment, which prevents the government from “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” which scholars widely interpret to require a separation of church and state. Broward County teacher Richard Judd, who attended the three-day training on the new civics curriculum, said the trainers told teachers, “This is the way you should think” [Ibid.]. Anna Fusco, president of the Broward Teachers Union, said, “Then they kind of slipped in a Christian values piece, ignoring the fact that this country is made up of so many different cultures and religions” [Ibid.]. If teachers can only present one view, how can students learn to think critically and evaluate the information offered?

And this same state has flip-flopped over the use of a specific textbook in health and still hasn’t made a decision for the start of this year’s instruction. Health professionals are alarmed, especially in a state with the third-highest rate of new HIV infections in the country according to the CDC, in a state ranked 23^rd for teen pregnancies. They point out that public opinion surveys show significant support for sexual education [Ibid.].

If these actions were limited to one state, I would be less concerned. But they are not. Lawmakers across the country are proposing bills like these: “’First Florida. Then Alabama. Now, lawmakers in Ohio and Louisiana are considering legislation that mimics the Florida law,’ according to NPR” [catholicvote.org]. After Florida passed the Don’t Say Gay Bill, 19 other states have introduced similar legislation [nbcnews.com]. For this issue alone, The Guardian identifies Georgia, Louisiana, Kansas, Indiana, Tennessee, Arizona, Oklahoma, Ohio, and South Carolina as states emulating the Florida Don’t Say Gay Bill. Education Week shows similarcontagion from state to state [theguardian.com].

Sexual orientation and gender identity are not the only flashpoint. Since January 2021, 14 states have passed laws prohibiting “critical race theory, even though that term refers to post-secondary scholarship. Legislators want to sanitize the nation’s history of slavery. These laws and orders, combined with local actions to restrict certain types of instruction, now impact more than one out of every three children in the country, according to a recent study from UCLA [edweek.org]. Education Week analyzed active state bills and warns that “Republicans this year have drastically broadened their legislative efforts to censor what’s taught in the classroom. What started in early 2021 as a conservative effort to prohibit teachers from talking about diversity and inequality in so-called ‘divisive’ ways or taking sides on ‘controversial’ issues has now expanded to include proposed restrictions on teaching that the United States is a racist country, that certain economic or political systems are racist, or that multiple gender identities exist, according to an Education Week analysis of 61 new bills and other state-level actions” [Ibid.].

Teaching has always been hard, and other factors [like the pandemic and verbal fights at school board meetings] have only increased its difficulty. But this national movement to disempower educators, to take away their decision-making, to make them fearful of lawsuits as they try to determine what subject matter is safe in their state, is crippling their ability to teach. A survey of members of the American Federation of Teachers shows dramatically increased job dissatisfaction, up from 27% in 2014 to 79% in 2022 [AFT Member Survey]. That news should be especially concerning given the existing shortage of teachers and the insufficiency of the pipeline of teachers in training.

Publishing my teaching memoir this year reminded me of the joys as well as the challenges of my career. Would I choose it now? I don’t know. Will others? The current climate hardly encourages the best and the brightest. Don’t our students deserve them?

Ray Bradbury Warned Us

I have always loved Ray Bradbury’s writing, both as a reader and as a teacher. His ability to create futuristic settings that accurately predict changes and their consequences – often painful consequences – has always provoked deep thought in both me and my students. I so loved teaching Fahrenheit 451, with its dire warnings ofthe potential impact of technology on free thought in the future. The protagonist’s wife wears thimble/seashell radios like today’s air pods and watches video on large parlor walls, realities today that were unforeseen by others in 1953. I always knew that his predictions proved uncannily accurate, but I never thought I’d see the book burning from Fahrenheit 451 come to pass now in our country. Sadly, it has.

On November 8, 2021, when the Spotsylvania County Public School Board in Virginia unanimously ordered its school libraries to begin removing “inappropriate” books, two board members, said they would like to see the removed books burned. One announced, “I think we should throw those books in a fire,” and another said he wants to “see the books before we burn them so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff” [time.com].

Since September, school libraries in at least seven states have removed books challenged by community members… Most of the challenged books so far, across fiction and non-fiction, are about race and LGBTQ identities [Ibid.].

The Executive Director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom warns that they are seeing “an unprecedented volume of challenges.” In twenty years of working for ALA, she “can’t recall a time when we had multiple challenges coming in on a daily basis” [Ibid.].

Challenges and book banning are not new. The vision that we should burn books and eliminate them from circulation, however, is. The culture wars that have been dividing this country have bred resistance to exposing readers to a range of ideas, especially about sexuality and race. “Schools around the country are scrutinizing and sometimes pulling books from the shelves, as backlash to stories centering on race, sex and queer identities becomes part of mainstream Republican politics” [WashPost]. It’s happening in Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott (R) “ramped up the rhetoric this week with orders for a statewide probe of potential ‘criminal activity’ surrounding ‘pornography’ in schools” [Ibid.]. South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster (R) seeks a similar investigation, and a Kansas school district temporarily froze library checkouts of 29 books after a parent complained before lifting the hold. [Ibid.] In Pennsylvania, a school district froze access to a long list of books and educational resources focused on people of color and anti-racism, including children’s picture books about civil rights icons Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr,” before critics convinced them to restore the books [Ibid.].

Bess Levin reminds us of the history of book burning: For those unaware of the historical precedents, book burnings have a long and dark history tied to censorship and oppressive regimes, most famously the one in Nazi Germany led by Adolf Hitler. In 1933, Nazis burned thousands of books deemed “un-German,” including the works of Jewish authors like Albert Einstein and those of “corrupting foreign influences” like Ernest Hemingway” [Vanity Fair].

Those who demand removal and even burning of books that show a different worldview from theirs would deprive their children – indeed all learners – of the chance to learn empathy and understanding, to explore worlds and situations different from what they already know. A high school English teacher in Spotsylvania offers a compelling argument against her school board’s decision. Christine Emba acknowledges that reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved, one of the books under attack, made her very uncomfortable with its sex, violence, and mention of bestiality.

“It was a hard read. You felt bad. It was also an illuminating corrective, studied against the Virginia backdrop of Robert E. Lee worship, Stonewall Jackson fetishization, and the plantations where enslaved people, we heard in our history classes, worked mostly happily for noble, caring masters. The novel taught me the power of literature, how words could transmit deep emotion. It did keep me up at night, because I was grappling with the pain of another person, wondering how someone could get to such a place, how people could do these things to one another. The gory details of the book fled my mind in the ensuing years. But the feeling — I never forgot it” [WashPost]. She describes this battle over books as a “a referendum on empathy and responsibility. A vote on Americans’ duty to engage and bear witness to their country’s past, or on the “parental right” to continue to turn a blind eye and make sure that children do, too” [Ibid.].

Don’t we want learners to grapple with the human condition and to appreciate the power of literature to illuminate it? Book burning is the enemy of freedom of thought, and its current popularity scares me. I don’t want this prediction of Bradbury’s to thrive in this country.