lthough I'm
a strong First Amendment advocate, I confess to "censoring" everything
I read—newspapers, books, billboards, junk mail,
what I read to myself, and what I read aloud. Another
word for it would be "editing." If I'm bored
with something I'm reading for pleasure, I usually skip
over it, as most people do. In other words, I edit-out
what bores or offends me.
If there is something in the
text that will detract from the book's impact or disturb
the class or child, skip it or change it. You're running
the program, not the person who wrote the book. The
author has no idea what the problems are in your classroom
or home. I am not suggesting, as one author-friend
feared, that you rewrite the book to the tastes of
the reader. Reason is called for, not revisionism.
The business of plodding along word-for-word, never
missing a line, said Clifton Fadiman,
one of the founders of the Great Books movement with
Mortimer Adler, is "chronic reverence," something
that may be good manners, but also a "confounded
waste of time."
Insignificant
editing is a long way, however, from the extremes to
which some would take us. Typical is the annual ranting
over Katherine Paterson'sBridge
to Terabithia. Still on The New York Times
Children's Best Seller list 20 years after it
was published, Terabithia is listed as one
of the most frequently contested book in America by
religious extremists.
Traditionally read in fourth
through sixth grades, this Newbery Award-winner describes
the beautiful friendship between a 10-year-old boy and
girl and the subsequent accidental drowning of the girl.
The author is the daughter of two Christian missionaries
to China and married to a Christian minister. The book
is widely regarded as one of the most poignant books
on childhood friendship and grief published in the last
quarter century.
Nonetheless, extremists
have pressured to have it banned because of: 1) The use
of several four-letter words ("hell" and "damn");
and 2) one of the children professes to her Christian
friends that, impressed as she is with the story of Christ,
she is a "nonbeliever."
The offending two
words are not strewn throughout the text. They are uttered
in a non-profane, almost solemn manner by a father after
the death of his son's best friend. Nor are they earthshaking.
Normal people don't expect the characters in children's
books to behave like sadists or serial killers but they
also don't expect them to behave like saints either.
If everyone in children's books must act like Mother
Theresa, we're going to have to stop reading
those Old Testament stories to children.
As for the objections
to Terabithia because of the young girl's agnosticism,
what law says we must all wear the same spiritual uniform?
We Christians can't even agree whether Christ's mother
was a virgin, whether he had brothers and sisters, or
whether the communion host is real, symbolic or "hocus
pocus." If we're going to eliminate nonbelievers
or doubters from books, will we start by erasing the
disciple Thomas?
Red Riding Hood,
the "Boozer"
Thomas the Doubter, in turn, brings
us to Red Riding Hood and her grandmother's bottle of
wine. It seems that when the late Trina Schart
Hyman was illustrating her 1984 Caldecott-winner, Little
Red Riding Hood(Holiday
House), one of the items she tucked into Red's
basket of goodies was a bottle of wine. Since most grandmothers
then and now drink an occasional glass of wine, this
was no big deal but certainly authentic to the time period
of the tale. (If it were meant to be a contemporary tale,
Red would have taken the bus or her mother would have
driven her across town, right?)
onetheless,
within a year of its publication, a brouhaha ensued when
a few vocal groups of parents wanted the book banned
because of the wine, that its very presence in the basket
constituted a bad example or threat to the temperance
of childhood.
After hearing the complaints, most
districts chose to keep the book in their library collections,
a few decided to remove it.
The purpose of "hearings" is
to determine if a discernible threat exists to children,
a threat that should be proven rationally, not just vocally.
How this small, easily overlooked bottle in the basket
would constitute a threat to sobriety is, to say the
least, a "stretch." Since nearly all the other Red
Riding Hood books in the 20th century did not include
the wine bottle, but teenage drinking and drunkenness
had been common community complaints for at least a half
century, it's a logical conclusion that decades of adolescent
intemperance could not be linked to Red Riding Hood.
(Mark Twain would have had a field day with such antics.
Imagine: Huck Finn's drunken father was home reading Little
Red Riding Hood.)
If the presence of wine in literature
constitutes a threat to sobriety, then a major overhaul
of the New Testament would have to accompany the banning
of Little Red Riding Hood. Without wishing to
sound irreverent but certainly true to the absurdity
of the censors, under the updated revisions, I assume Jesus would
be turning water into "lemonade" at the wedding
feast in Cana, and St. Paul's advice
to Timothy would be to "use a little
Dr. Pepper for thy stomach's sake and thine often infirmities."
The Great Textbook War
In the midst of the culture wars of
the late '60s and '70s, the first great textbook
war broke out in West Virginia when the local conservatives
of Kanawha County declared war on the local progressives
over their new textbooks, a war that included boycotts,
bullets, and bomb threats. Trey Kay won a 2010 Peabody
Award for his radio documentary on that 1974 battle.
Many parallels can be drawn between the fears of those
West Virginia parents and the fears of today’s
Texas state textbook committee. It’s
worth noting that in the intervening quarter century,
the grand fears of the West Virginia families and churches
never materialized and the state’s education still
ranks in the bottom 15 in the nation. One of the most
telling moments and quotes comes from a West Virginia
parent who declares during the broadcast, “If I
have been successful as a parent, nothing my children
can read in school will hurt them.” That in itself
is worth hours of debate. Listen
to The
Great Textbook War at: http://www.wvpubcast.org/newsarticle.aspx?id=11860 (58 mins.)
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