OPINION: LETTER TO THE EDITOR
Dear Editor, Maybe I got it all wrong. Maybe Texas isn’t the home of rugged individualism. Maybe the myth of the Lone Ranger is just that, a myth. And maybe Texas’s famous aversion to governmental Grundyism is just a pose.
That’s my best take on the situation after reading about a recent action by the San Marcos CISD Board of Trustees, clearing 32 “challenged” book titles for purchase for school libraries. Don’t get me wrong, I’m pleased that the Board took this action. They did the right thing. And the challenged titles? Just about all of them were high-school level, with a couple of middle-school titles as well.
So, what’s my beef? It comes down to the fact that the Texas Legislature’s Republican majority, aided and abetted by Governor Greg Abbott, enacted a bill, Senate Bill 13, that essentially gives veto power over books in school libraries to any individual in a school district who doesn’t think a particular book should be there. It doesn’t have to be a parent or, indeed, anybody with a direct connection to a student or to any one of our schools – just somebody who objects to what other people’s kids may be reading.
Way back when I was going to school, we called people like that Nosy Parkers. That was a phrase I learned at home. Both my mom and dad had no use for them. And they made sure my sister and I felt the same way. We still do.
At about the same time, in the classroom, we were exposed to new ideas, new concepts, new authors, new books, and new words. One of those words was “censorship.” We knew it was a bad word. And there were a lot of bad words out there, the kind that could get your mouth washed out with soap.
But “censorship” was different; it came with baggage that those other words didn’t carry. It meant you couldn’t say certain things. You couldn’t read certain things. You couldn’t watch certain things. And if you couldn’t do any of that, it meant you couldn’t think certain things. It was definitely un-American.
Congress even had something called the House Un-American Activities Committee. But, somehow, its members got the idea all mixed up and it went after creative types because they weren’t thinking the right thoughts or espousing the ideas the Committee thought they should. On the other side of the Capitol, in the Senate, was a guy named Joe McCarthy, who pretty much felt the same way. He did everything he could to destroy people who not only believed in free speech, but who dared to practice it. Here was our own government, shutting people down for taking the First Amendment seriously.
I guess you could say that the House Un-American Activities Committee was more un-American than any of the people or organizations it was figuratively burning at the stake. It destroyed careers. It destroyed reputations. It destroyed lives. And it threw shade at the ideas and the ideals that were at the heart of the American experiment. Fortunately, over time, people said, “Enough!”
A brave man, CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, stood tall and took on McCarthy. “As a nation,” he said, “we have come into our full inheritance at a tender age. We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.”
That may sound like a long way to travel, from a school library policy to the takedown of a despotic, disgraced demagogue more than 70 years ago. But it’s not.
It all boils down to this. Our schools are staffed by professional educators – teachers, librarians, and administrators. They receive years of training in their fields and, individually and collectively have years of experience in educating our students. They work with them every day. They understand their students’ abilities, their challenges, and their potential. They tailor their courses, their lessons, and their assignments to the needs of the students, all the while working within the requirements and benchmarks established by the Texas State Board of Education.
They know, from training and experience, what works – and what doesn’t. They know what’s age appropriate – and what’s not. They know when to introduce new concepts. They know how to do their jobs. I guess you could say they have an edge over the political types and Nosy Parkers who try to second-guess them.
And Senate Bill 13 is all about second-guessing. Until this school term, it was the educators who made the call as to what should be on the shelves of school libraries. And there were already standards that address that.
But the bill established a new bureaucracy – one with no particular professional qualifications – that reviews and makes recommendations about what goes in or stays in the school libraries. If the librarians want to purchase a book, they have to get approval from this new group, the School Library Advisory Council. And then the Council’s action gets kicked up to the Board of Trustees.
The Council also gets to make recommendations about books that have been challenged. While it recently gave the green light to keeping almost three dozen challenged books, this remains, at heart, a process with no direct accountability to the communities served by the San Marcos schools. There is no guarantee that, in the future, political agendas will not guide their selections.
The simple fact is that the previous process worked just fine. The last thing we need is an additional layer of government with the authority to override the judgement of our professional educators about which books are made available in school libraries. In essence, the legislature and Greg Abbott have opened the door to a board of censors and the creation of school libraries that support groupthink. How un-Texan of them!
The Lone Ranger would be appalled.
Sincerely, Jon Leonard San Marcos
