We Need a Policy, Not a Fire

With disturbing regularity, novels and textbooks are yanked from school classrooms across the nation, because someone somewhere finds them objectionable. Yet a recent survey found that nearly one-quarter of the school districts in California have no formal policies to deal with such objections.

Attacks upon great literature for young adults and children are nothing new--from “Catcher in the Rye” to “Little Red Riding Hood.” The advocacy group People for the American Way documented 244 book challenges in the 1989-90 school year, and California accounted for almost one-third of those. Unfortunately, it’s such fertile ground for controversy that each school district in the state now needs to have a clear and well-defined policy of how to handle, (and fend off most) objections to school reading materials.

A nonchalant attitude about preserving precious freedoms too often creates an atmosphere that encourages censorship. The most pressing danger is that school officials will simply remove a book from a library or a class curriculum rather than debate its merits.

The lack of formal policies likely results in “preemptive” censorship, said Louise Adler, an education professor at Cal State Fullerton who conducted the recent survey. “It means that either a district will not give someone a fair hearing, or someone will just remove a text without really considering what should be done,” she said.

An example of such a “preemptive strike” was cited in People for the American Way’s annual censorship report. A school official in La Puente requested that Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” be removed from a ninth-grade classroom, because the official was afraid that someone would object to a picture of a hanging cat that accompanied the famous short story. So in a move to avoid controversy, the book was removed.

Such a chilling incident is all the more reason why every school district should have clear procedures for logging objections to school reading materials. That way, protesters can be heard--but their angry voices alone will not be enough to cower supporters of the intellectual freedom on which this nation was built.