From CNN:
More than a 1,000 books have been banned in 86 school districts in 26 states across the United States, a new PEN America analysis shows.PEN America, a literary and free expression advocacy organization, released a detailed analysis on Thursday of challenges to and bans on school library books and class curriculums. The group said it documented media reports, consulted school district websites, and spoke with librarians, authors and teachers from July 31, 2021, to March 31, 2022.According to PEN America, in that period, there were 1,586 books banned. Texas led the country with the most book bans — 713 — affecting 16 school districts, followed by Pennsylvania and Florida with 456 and 204 bans, respectively. PEN America describes a book ban as “any action taken against a book based on its content” that leads to the removal or restriction of a previously accessible book. The analysis includes book removals or restrictions that lasted at least a day, the group says.
Jonathan Friedman, director of PEN America’s Free Expression and Education program and lead author of the report, said challenges to books in American schools are nothing new, but the rate at which they have recently taken place is “unparalleled.”
“Challenges to books, specifically books by non-White male authors, are happening at the highest rates we’ve ever seen,” Friedman said. “What is happening in this country in terms of banning books in schools is unparalleled in its frequency, intensity, and success.”
. . . .
The group says the book bans were directed at 1,145 different titles, many of which tell stories related to LGBTQ people and people of color.
PEN America said the analysis of book titles was based on “standard publishing information provided through marketing and sales materials by publishers for books, as well as relevant reading and review of the books in question.”
. . . .
Politicians and school board members have played a significant role in book banning, PEN America says. At least 41% of book bans were linked to directives from state officials or elected lawmakers.
In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott has pressured school boards to remove what he calls “pornography” from school libraries. Meanwhile in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill late last month that requires school libraries to post more information about their collections and seek community input on materials they acquire.
The trend, PEN America says, is a departure from past book removal practices, which were usually initiated by community members.
The book bans “have become a favorite tool for state-wide and national political mobilization” with groups such as Moms for Liberty, a conservative group whose “mission is to organize, educate and empower parents,” curating lists of books to be challenged and urging parents to mobilize, the analysis says.
The group also found that at least 96% of the bans were initiated by school administrators or board members and that for the most part, school officials did not follow existing guidelines, raising “serious concerns,” it said.
Link to the rest at CNN
PG wonders who else other than elected school board members and the parents of students attending a public school should determine what sort of books their children should read.
PG also doesn’t have a problem with people residing in some geographic locations making different choices about what is appropriate for their children to read.
PEN America presently has 7,500 members. Its principal office is in New York City with another office in Santa Monica, California and a third in Washington, DC.
The current president of PEN America, Ayad Akhtar, lives in New York City. The overwhelming majority of PEN America’s staff lives in New York City with much smaller number based in Santa Monica and Washington, DC. (For visitors from overseas, Santa Monica is solidly ensconced in the Los Angeles metropolitan area.)
If PG were asked to list three large metropolitan areas that are the least representative of the majority of the population of the United States, he would, without hesitation, name New York, Los Angeles and Washington, DC, in that order. PG has spent substantial periods of time in each of those cities/metro areas and can say with confidence that he has a pretty good idea of the sorts of people likely to staff PEN America’s offices in each of those places.
While he won’t categorically reject the opinions of the PEN staff regarding choices made by Texas school boards and parents about what their the children for whom they are responsible should read, PG will with confidence say that the opinions of those in the New York PEN office are exceptionally unrepresentative of almost everybody in Texas. PG would guess that few members of PEN management have close friends or acquaintances in Texas.
The current PEN America senior management appear to come from an exceptionally homogeneous backgrounds. The bios PG was able to access showed that virtually everyone attended college in New York or Boston (there was one outlier from the University of Chicago, an elite institution that isn’t located within 50 miles of an ocean). Everybody listed in Los Angeles appeared to have attended colleges located in the same places that staff in the New York office attended.
PG says that Texans and Floridians can be pretty certain that nobody at PEN America is much like them or holds views about almost anything that parents of public schools in Texas or Florida believe are relevant to their parenting decisions, including decisions about what sort of books their children should be reading.
PG will note that both Texas and Florida have a much higher percentage of Latinos (AKA persons of color) in their populations than the state of New York does.
PEN America is simply too provincial to be credible outside of the narrow social, educational and cultural sphere its employees inhabit.
Personally, my problem with the culture wars is the arguments always boil down to “They don’t think the way we do.”
And?
Why should they? For any value of “they”?
What is the value of forcing conformity? Not having to consider the value of your tribe’s ways?
Where is the threat of divergent thought?
And most critical: where does the culture war stop? At the border? Or is a local victory to be followed by a regional campaign and a global jihad?
The french think so:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/09/world/europe/france-threat-american-universities.html?action=click&module=News&pgtype=Homepage
Culture war politics strike me as axiomatic and absolutist as any cult. And as militant as any Madrassa. That combination historically has led to violence.
And still no explanation of what exactly is tbe benefit of either position.
Except having the power to control the lives of others.
Even Putin has a semi-rational justification, outdated and backwards as it is.
Pox ‘pon both houses. Neither is the boss of me.
I own myself.
Agreed. And my point wasn’t which side is “better”, it’s whether it is the State’s business (no). After you’ve acknowledged that, the decisions are simple.
And the “the family can’t afford to buy the book” claims just don’t wash… there is no overwhelming merit in forcing some particular work of fiction on a child, overriding the parental rights and responsibilities. “Hi, I’m the State and I know best” is a vicious claim. Protection of life & limb — OK. Indoctrination, nope.
If I may point out a slippery slope here in two words:
Branch Davidian.
(Note: I make no universal statement of any kind that “the State knows best” of any kind — my first career was in, umm, opposition to certain inimical States, and I got my butt shot at for the privilege.)
Or, more to the point:
Facts matter. Ideology, well, doesn’t, whether it’s “partisan” or “political” or “religious” or “cultural,” beyond the limitation that “ideology is not an adequate justification for killing or enslavement, ever.” Which doesn’t make dealing with the results of ideological misconduct ever easy; being the Old Man in units that still had significant cohorts of former draftees, and were beginning to have significant cohorts of women, demonstrated that rather viscerally… like having to explain, repeatedly, to the good ol’ boy senior NCO from rural Alabama that providing free CSA-associated trinkets was really not ever appropriate, and certainly not now that there were two African-Americans (this was the 80s, terminology was different) in his highly-technical shop. Like seeing a couple of sherriff’s deputies screaming at an out-of-uniform black NCO at a mall while his white wife and mixed-race preschooler looked on.
And remember that these are “easy” instances precisely because they’re “mere appearances”; it’s a lot tougher when ideology becomes indoctrination and often outright brainwashing on more-subtle issues and intolerance. I’m not quite old enough to remember “NINA” signs… but I have lived in places, as an adult (that is, some time since the end of the Cretaceous), in which “Sunday closing” laws have been applied to prevent Certain People* from filling prescriptions outside the work week.
My point is only that sometimes the State does know best… or at least better than the way some parents would create another generation of abusers. It requires listening, and book-banning is as a general principle the precise opposite of that — especially when it involves captive audiences. Remember, after all, that “particular work[s] of fiction” are often rhetorical choices as much as anything else; The Jungle is just one example.
* Pharmacies closed at 6pm on Saturdays in that area (all of them; one was expected to drive 15 miles to the Big City) and stayed closed until Monday morning. Which sort of played favorites as to “which day is the Sabbath,” didn’t it?
There are indeed some areas where the state knows best. For example, no child molesting.
However, if we are going to invoke the notion that the state knows best, we have to apply and defend that idea in the specific case of book curation. Othwerwise, we can just as easily invoke the notion that the state does not know best. Two words: Jim Crow.
You seem a bit off of your game today, C.E. Two of those arguments for “the State knows best” are actually excellent counter-examples.
For “slippery slope,” consider that the State decides who can hang out their shingle to perform heart surgery. (I hope that 100% of the people here agree with that, yes?)
That same State, though, then takes on the “duty” to decide who can braid hair. (Which, by the way, was quite a blow to the “POC community” that the State constantly speaks of “protecting.”)
Ah, but you’re missing the context of “braiding hair”: Those restrictions were originally put in place with at least a facially tenable relationship to public health. Not the braiding; the spreading of lice and other hair-born pests. Of course, that wasn’t the entire justification, nor, perhaps, imperative now. But then, nobody (whether the State or otherwise) ever has multiple purposes or hidden agendas, do they?
And I was not at all claiming that “the State is always right”; I was cautioning that sometimes — perhaps many times — the State has a severe case of multiple-personality disorder, often reflected in the real abuses of power residing outside the State with the State’s acquiescence (and, as in the instance of the cops at the mall, outright collusion — you’d have to know more about that mall in Midwest City, Oklahoma in 1986, and then you’d be subjected to the particularly obnoxious tropical-print shirt I was wearing that fine Saturday morning). But that all too often, “other than the State” is worse.
Plus, most (all?) states require training and licensing for barbers. I expect that’s part of the story of braiding restrictions.
Another part being bureaucratic imperialism.
No bureaucrat ever passed up the oportunity to increase the scope of their power and “mission creep” is a perfect way to do it as long as tbey can come up with the flimsiest excuse.
Remember, too, that not all that long ago in geological time, “barbers” and “surgeons” were the same people; that during the Crimean War surgeons for the Royal Army were recruited from among the barbers in London’s East End, and had statistically-comparable survival rates following their efforts at battlefield limb removal to academically-trained surgeons; and that a prominent NYC university had a “College of Surgeons and Barbers” until 1907 (or a couple years either way, I’m about 3000km away from the references).
Licenses for “hair braiding” sound ridiculous in concept only when not looking at the broader perspective. Which is not, by any means, a defense of the actual implementation of the licensing scheme; just because hair-borne pests are a problem doesn’t justify the rest, specifically including the non-Ricardian rents of the “preparation for licensing” system that extends beyond the public-health aspects.
Banning a book is a sure way to stimulate interest in books and increase their sales, the exact opposite of the book banners’ goals. They’re morons, and shouldn’t control any public institution.
Funny, that is what the other side says.
Still no verifiable data.
Just both sides demonizing each other.
Are there any studies tbat prove *those* books are *necessary*?
I can understand fighting to keep algebrw and science in schools, but fiction?h
Just mandates by fiat.
Strikes me as questionable thinking.
Necessity is a function of objective. If my objective is to mow the lawn, a TV is not necessary,. A lawn mower is.
So, the necessity of a book depends on the objective. The argument isn’t about the book but about the objective and how the book is necessary to meet that objective.
They’re morons, and shouldn’t control any public institution.
What specific subset of society should control public institutions?
Our betters, apparently.
But we’re not entitled to ask questions.
Ours is but to obey.
I ask all the time, and am regularly disappointed at the lack of an answer. Reminds one of Senator Blackburn asking for a definition of a woman.
Why offer up an answer you’d have to stand behind?
No need to defend a position you don’t define.
If a parent disagrees with a book banning, he can buy it for his kids directly. They’re his children, until they’re old enough to judge for themselves, not wards of the state in terms of reading material. All a book banning accomplishes in this context is removing the book from the school library, not the stores.
Parents choose religious upbringing (if any) for their kids, too. Should that be subject to the control of others?
We are a country committed to equal rights for all, not equal fashionable opinions.
“Parents choose religious upbringing (if any) for their kids, too. Should that be subject to the control of others? ”
If the children belong to the state, yes.
That is the fundamental question at stake: who owns the kids?
For that matter, in that scenario, the state can forbid home schooling to ensure kids are *forced* to read what is good for them, not just have it available in a school library.
Yes. My position, which I have held since my own childhood, is that it is not the job of schools to socialize children – it is the parent’s (or legal guardian’s) exclusive arena.
That is whether the socialization is to produce a Marxist gender-fluid Atheist, or a conservative heterosexual Christian.
NOT. THE. BUSINESS. OF. THE. STATE.
Presuming, of course, that:
(a) There’s a budget in that household for books that will be read once (because there’s no way to tell if that child/children will choose to reread); and
(b) Said parent has the impetus to do something Not Matching Local Received Wisdom, and that is far rarer than it should be; and
(c) Purchasing the banned book is logistically possible (a lot harder when that single parent’s mother, with whom that single parent moved back in after the ugly divorce, is one of the leaders of the book-banning movement)
Then, perhaps, as you will… if one also accepts that the median parent-child relationship is appropriate sufficiently outside the median. On personal experience, I don’t. And I also note that condition (a) in particular is not nearly so universal as might be expected.
Said parent has the impetus to do something Not Matching Local Received Wisdom, and that is far rarer than it should be
If he doesn’t have he impetus, then he has no reason to buy the book. So what? Someone else may want his kid to read the book. Again, so what?
Delegating everything to local school boards and parents is far from optimal; it’s something like a not-normally-as-bad-as-other-options thing. (Other options that are worse? The system in Texas with state-level designation of books, and I don’t just mean because of the November 1963 role of the Book Depository in Dallas. I’ve had to deal with them for science textbooks, and it’s… disquieting.) The danger of delegation-to-local-school-boards-without-oversight is foolishness like the Dover Area School District when its board gets coopted by — ok, ok, this is a family-friendly forum — closed-minded jerks with undemocratic agendas.
The counterpoint to PEN being in unrepresentative areas is the hostility to outsiders — books, ideas, people — in much of the country. “It won’t play in Peoria” is at least as “unrepresentative” of the majority of the population of the United States as LaLa Land. (NYC is the country — just ask almost any resident; DC is not another country, but another space-time continuum.) The less said about insularity in truly rural communities, the better. And lurking underneath that is the disturbing tendency in localities that don’t have adequate oversight to define “harmful to the children” as “something that the loudest/most-politically-powerful population segment disagrees with”; when I was stationed in Oklahoma City in the 1980s, attempting to teach the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was a fireable offense (happened to the high-school-teacher-wife of a slightly-more-senior colleague).
The problem with local school boards is that they are seldom, in fact, democratic (a typical winning school board member receives less than 40% of the eligible votes, through a combination of low voter turnout and various shenanigans) and an exhibit in the Dunning-Kruger Hall of Fame. It’s not that all too many of them can’t read; it’s that they won’t, are convinced that they don’t need to, and understand “irony” as being just like goldy and bronzy but made out of iron.
“Checks and balances” means that local school boards and the parents of the students need to be checked, too.
Who bells the cat?
With what objective?
Does the payoff justify the costs in an age of internet communities?
The 60’s was three generations ago and isolated rural comunities aren’t all that isolated.
Bravo!
“It won’t play in Peoria” is at least as “unrepresentative” of the majority of the population of the United States as LaLa Land.
Of course it is unrepresentative. But we don’t see Peoria complaining about curation in LaLa Land.
Only if one doesn’t look very hard. Peoria and Western Illinois were only a few miles from where I spent a couple of decades quite recently; the complaints about “Left Coast values tearing at the fabric of American society” — including book-banning parties in two school districts adjacent to Peoria in the early 2000s — weren’t just audible, but prevalent once one got six miles or so away from the den of iniquity that hosts one of the two or three leading graduate programs in librarianship.
There is plenty of data there, contrary to complaints elsewhere regarding the lack thereof.
I agree they didn’t like the imposition of left coast values. But they really didn’t care what values the left coasts adopted. They simply didn’t want anything to do with them.
Citations would be useful.
Attorney-client privilege and duties of loyalty prevent me from being that specific.
Yeah, this sounds like the internet meme about “secret supporters,” but it’s a centuries-old problem for lawyers. And, for that matter, for former government workers (a portion of the NDA from my first career is itself classified…). It is what it is. Literally all I’m allowed to do is say “well, the archives of the Peoria Journal-Star and Champaign News Gazette from the first decade of this century have oodles of supporting pieces” — but when I was at hearings or speaking to others (public or otherwise) in a representative capacity, that cuts off my right to point at specifics.
tl;dr Due to the way some knowledge arrives at my desk, I can’t disclose enough about the sources to allow anyone else to verify it. The same goes for others whose professional lives rely on confidences… often including reporters (“Follow the money”…).
I’d say San Francisco is just as insular, just with different beliefs.
For NYC, well, of course, there’s the classic New Yorker cover….
What is the classic New Yorker cover? I’m more familiar with “the classic New Yorker cartoon, which is obtuse, clever, and generally not particularly funny.
Here’s the Wikipedia link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/View_of_the_World_from_9th_Avenue
Hopefully you’ll enjoy it more than the typical New Yorker cartoon 🙂
following TonyT’s helpful link, here’s more…
https://saulsteinbergfoundation.org/essay/view-of-the-world-from-9th-avenue/
“provincial perception”
“local chauvinism”
I’d really like to see what percentages of these “bans” are actually “bans” rather than “we are not going to force kids to read this book.” Something tells me that at least 90% of these “bans” are actually the latter, and it would be really nice if the people at PEN would get over themselves.
Also, schools and teachers: “We want parents to be more involved in their kids’ education!”
Parents: (get involved in ways that involve questioning the “experts.”)
Schools and teachers: “No! Not like that!”
+1
Meanwhile in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a bill late last month that requires school libraries to post more information about their collections and seek community input on materials they acquire.
So what?
Two questions:
1- Who owns the children? And thus is responsible for their upbringing.
2- Who pays for the books? And thus is responsible for the message they carry?