Hey folks: I’m busy with paid work today. But I wanted to share with you my latest column for McClatchy, which appears in the Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle.
During my junior year of high school, I set out on a mission: to spend the year reading books with controversial reputations, that had sometimes been banned, or whose authors had been blacklisted — an earlier era’s version of “cancel culture.”
It was more interesting than doing my homework.
With three decades of hindsight, it is obvious I had a narrow conception of which books merited attention. The reading list was packed with white guys. I read “Catch-22” by Joseph Heller, “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, “Johnny Got His Gun” by Dalton Trumbo — anti-war classics, all — and a few others. It was a fantastic, foundational year of reading that continues to shape me.
The topic, obviously, is the increasing efforts (mostly but not exclusively from the right) to clamp down on “controversial” books — mostly having to do with race and gender — in school libraries, both in my home state of Kansas and more broadly in the United States. 1
I was inspired to write by this recent story at NPR’s Wichita affiliate:
The Goddard school district, west of Wichita, recently emailed families with step-by-step instructions for how to view their children’s library history, going back as many as 500 titles.
Officials said the district’s library software has given parents online access to their children’s records for years. But recent, high-profile book challenges prompted the reminder.
“Parents have always had access to review curriculum, to know what the books are that are in our libraries,” said district spokesman Dane Baxa. “This just gives them access to that information.”
And that’s not a one-off.
In the recent email to families, Goddard school librarians touted the district’s Destiny Library management system as a way to collaborate and partner with parents. The district also posts library catalogs for all Goddard schools on its website.
The Destiny software is used by many Kansas school districts, including Wichita, Topeka, and Shawnee Mission.
Well, yikes.
Rather than push for some kind of policy solution to the issue in today’s column, I simply offer parents a little advice:
Maybe you can be Big Brother where your kids'2 reading habits are concerned, but probably you shouldn’t be.
Why? Because reading the banned books let me put my own taste and values into action:
I rolled my eyes at the whiny protagonist of J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye.” And I put down Robert A. Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” half-finished, because the story disturbingly challenged my Christian faith — and didn’t finish it until after I graduated college.
I’m so glad I got to make the choice to put away those books, instead of having that choice made for me by school administrators or — worse — somebody else’s parents. That was the beginning of adulthood for me. Kansas kids will lose something if they don’t get to make those same choices for themselves.
A little leeway is a good thing.
Top o’ the pops
I’m looking at you, Texas.
I’m talking teens here, mostly. Of course parents are going to track what their eight-year-olds are reading.