Questionable Curriculum:

Censorship Vs. Wise Book Selection

 

            Nobody likes censorship. It violates our most precious constitutional freedom - freedom of ideas, thought and expression, as guaranteed in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

 

            But notice something: only a unit of GOVERNMENT can actually censor anything, under our laws.

 

            Private citizens can't actually censor, because they don't have the power. Books assigned or recommended in school classrooms and school libraries are actually owned by the taxpayers - represented by the government. When parents and private citizens object to those books, those parents aren't trying to be censors.

 

            Instead, they're trying to help their government representatives - school officials and educators - make wiser choices about the ideas and images that schoolbooks are putting into young hearts and minds.

 

            If parents stole books from schools, libraries or private bookstores and burned them because of their objectionable content, then yes, that would be unlawful, atrocious and an attempt at censorship.

 

            But that's not what a growing number of parents and taxpayers are complaining about. They don't want to censor anything or break any laws - actually, they want to raise awareness of ways in which school curriculum that is extremist and shocking actually censors the quality.

 

We don't want to keep anybody from having access to R- and X-rated books - we just don't want them given to our kids in schools or placed in school libraries. We don't harp a bit on the placement of objectionable books in private-sector bookstores, or in public libraries.

 

            And those parents and taxpayers aren't complaining about a cuss word here, a kiss there, or the depiction of a teenager smoking or a grownup swigging an occasional glass of wine. By no means are they insisting on nothing but G-rated content. That's not the real world in which kids now live, and it's true that the future is likely to be only coarser, not more refined.

 

It's just that . . . the graphic sexual, violent and profane content in many, many schoolbooks assigned to children and youth today is staggeringly more shocking and objectionable than that. And the vast majority of parents and even teachers have no idea of the scope and sequence of it, from kindergarten through senior year. It's certainly not a problem with all the books, or even most of them. But it is indeed a very serious problem with a few.

 

We're talking about rape scenes, murder scenes, group sex, oral sex, bestiality . . . you just have to read some of the excerpts and see if you can keep from gasping.

 

Schools are legally much different than a private-sector business or even a public library where all ages congregate. Schools are full of minor children who belong to their parents, not the government. Therefore, it is a huge parents' rights issue to be able to keep objectionable books away from our kids.

 

            Even the left-wing National Council of Teachers of English agrees with that - that parents have a right to choose what their kids will NOT read.

 

            Look: Hollywood "censors" certain movies from people based on age with its rating system. Does it make sense that schools wouldn't have to do the same thing with curriculum?

 

            Do you know many parents who are happy to have their children looking at Internet porn, Penthouse, snuff films, or the Playboy Channel? Then can you imagine that it could be OK to let school officials expose students to much the same content in their schoolbooks, usually without parental knowledge or consent?

 

            Wiser book selection, not censorship, is what it's all about when parents or citizens come to a school or an after-school program complaining about the sex, violence, profanity, vulgarity, drug and alcohol use, or other age-inappropriate and/or unlawful content contained in the books put before kids.

 

            According to the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Pico v. Board of Education (1982), school boards have full discretion to remove books from schools that are pervasively vulgar, educationally unsuitable, or both. That's not "censorship." That's good public policy.

 

            And it's a good policy for parents, citizens and after-school professionals to remember, too.