Even Old Books Can Teach Children Volumes

As wars go, it wasn’t much of one.

A few parents, a few administrators butting heads at a smallish school out in the San Fernando Valley. Nothing to get exercised about--just a little skirmish over the 1st Amendment, that’s all.

Topeka Drive Elementary in Northridge was number 200-something on the Los Angeles Unified School District’s list of schools whose libraries should be purged of worn and outdated and obsolete books--a first step toward computerizing the place.

Sharon Moran, who runs the school library, thought this could be useful, and the district had promised her money for 500 new books.

So in she went on Tuesday morning--into a library that looked ransacked. Here, according to Moran and a couple of parents, is what happened:

The district people had already begun pulling books off the shelves. They were stacked on tables, the card envelopes pulled out and a red “discard” stamp inked onto each volume.

Topeka Avenue’s is not a large library. By the time the cullers stopped, for reasons we’ll get to presently, 763 books, a tenth of the library’s holdings, were chosen for disposition.

They stopped not because they were done, but because Moran and the parents who had volunteered to help and a few others who saw the to-do wanted some answers first. What’s wrong with this book? What’s the problem with that one?

Biographies of Robert Goddard, the rocket pioneer; Thomas Edison; Eleanor Roosevelt; Joe Namath and Sandy Koufax--out. The Hardy Boys. “Famous Negro Americans” came off the shelf, in time for Black History Month.

The fifth grade is about to write reports on Benjamin Franklin, and there were Topeka Avenue’s Franklin biographies in the obsolete pile. “Why,” Moran asked, “are you taking Ben Franklin books?” She was told, she said, that “ ‘You need to get updated versions.’ I said, ‘Here’s a news flash for you: He’s still dead. Nobody is writing biographies of Ben Franklin.’ ”

Malinda Wayt has twin 8-year-old stepsons at Topeka. She was in the library Tuesday morning. “Who made these decisions? What are the criteria? I said, ‘A book removed from shelves of this library has to have a fair trial. There are consequences to removing a book; that’s a lot of power.’ ”

In the face of such indignation, the district people left. The farewells were cool. The administrators said they had never before had a problem like this.

Some problem. The district complains when parents aren’t involved in their children’s education, and then gets shirty when they are. This is the same district that has pumped millions down the Belmont sump, clearing libraries of books it can’t afford to replace. Whose interests, whose agenda are being served here?

*

What is an “obsolete” book, anyway?

Wayt took home a discarded volume on explorer Jacques Cartier to figure it out. “It called the Indians ‘savages’ and told how the Indians got smarter about their gold and pearls and made it harder for Cartier to make money. It was bad. You know how Archie Bunker was bad? But Archie Bunker taught us a lot about ourselves.”

Moran’s children once read that book, and asked, “ ‘Mom, why does it say Indians are savages?’ And we sat down and that’s the beginning of a discussion. I don’t think we should never read about that; it’d be like pretending such things never happened.”

So children must be protected from that old lech Ben Franklin, and from knowing that “Negro” and “colored” were once common terms for African Americans?

There’s always something a book can teach us--even if it’s not what the author intended. A 1950s book praising Cartier--a dead white European male--would likely leave a modern student thinking, “What a jerk.” The operative word is thinking.

Science can change before the ink on the journals dries, but it keeps in its archives the fact that humankind once believed the sun revolved around the Earth and little animals grew spontaneously in dung heaps. Science as it is emerged from science as it was; it learns as much from its errors as from its successes. So, too, does humanity.

A footnote to the battle of Topeka Avenue:

Moran said she was told that students need new books with shiny covers and more pictures, or they won’t read them. “Doesn’t that teach kids that things that are worn and shabby have no worth?”

And I thought of the tale of Aladdin--if Aladdin is still permitted reading--and his bride who was hoodwinked into giving up the battered old lamp in exchange for a shiny new one that was, after all, just a lamp, possessed of no magic at all.

Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com.