Iowa school book ban undermines the state’s mission of educating its students

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When I was a kid growing up in eastern Iowa during the 1970s, the school library opened up the world to me.

I remember rushing through my homework during study hall, so I could get to the library.

Like most students in school, there were classes I loved (history and English) and those I hated (math and science). But despite my misgivings about the curriculum, never did I doubt my love for the school library. To me, it was a refuge for independent thought and exploration, where nobody could exercise control over where my mind wandered.

There, the world beckoned, and I eagerly dove in.

The idea never occurred to me that a librarian would curb my youthful curiosity by stripping these shelves of books. Never did I suspect they aimed to shield my eyes from discovery.

I would have laughed at the notion my education was better served by exposing me to fewer books.

Yet for the last year, Republican legislators and Gov. Kim Reynolds have tried to partially pull the curtains over these windows to the world.

They try to convince us their book ban law is nothing more than a commonsense prohibition on books that describe or depict a sex act.

But what they don’t say is it doesn’t matter whether the description is graphic, explicit or subtle; if it is a single sentence or pages of gratuitous filth; their law punishes equally the books that offer no literary merit and those that are time-tested classics, Pulitzer Prize winners — even self-help guides aimed at helping young students from being victimized by sexual assault.

This lack of discretion is why the law has taken 3,400 books out of school libraries, according to the Des Moines Register.

Was there really that much filth on library shelves?

I don’t think so.

Nevertheless, Iowa Republicans won a partial victory for their year-old book ban Aug. 9.

A three-judge panel of the federal 8 ^th Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis ruled that a district judge in Iowa erred last December in temporarily blocking the law after objections were filed by Iowa students and teachers, authors and publishing houses.

It was only a partial victory for the state. The appeals court sent the case back to the lower court for further review, and it rejected a key line of defense for Reynolds and company.

At the same time, the judges — each appointed by a Republican president — told the lower court “Iowa is not required to tolerate speech that undermines or is inconsistent with its central mission of educating Iowa children.”

Some see this as the court possibly hinting at the merits of the law.

I don’t know precisely the message these appellate judges were sending. But it is unfathomable to me that a law that has led to banning hundreds of books could, in any sane context, be considered “consistent with the central mission of educating Iowa children.”

The mission of educating Iowa children does not mean, in the words of previous courts, imposing a “ pall of orthodoxy ” so pervasive it fails to distinguish between the maturity level of a 3 ^rd grader and a 17-year-old high school senior who is preparing to graduate to the challenging world beyond.

The mission of educating Iowa children is not consistent with banning “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

Yet, it is so .

Republican lawmakers claim their intent wasn’t to sweep this broadly. I don’t know if I believe them, but it is clear this is the effect of their law. And it’s not happening — as some Republicans suggest — because a cabal of librarians are banning reams of books in order to sow confusion.

No, it is because this law is overbroad and vague. Well-meaning librarians across the state honestly differ on how to apply this law. That is why books are banned in some libraries, but not others. It is why lawyers and courts continue to wrestle over what it actually means to “describe” something.

The courts will decide whether this law is unconstitutionally overbroad and vague.

But it is instructive that included in the Register’s tally of the top 10 most banned books stemming from this law are: “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the 1985 novel by Margaret Atwood about a patriarchal future society dominated by a Christian fundamentalist regime; and “The Color Purple,” the Alice Walker novel from 1982 that, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica , concerns a Black teenager who “overcomes oppression and abuse to find fulfillment and independence.”

Are these the ideas that we want to deny 17-year-olds?

Is this the kind of speech that “undermines or is inconsistent” with Iowa’s central mission of educating its children?

On the contrary. It’s the arbitrary denial of these ideas that should offend us.

A half century ago, the U.S. Supreme Court found in the landmark decision, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District , that students can’t be “regarded as closed-circuit recipients of only that which the State chooses to communicate”; that they do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

Seven years later, in the most famous Supreme Court case involving school library book bans, a plurality of justices added “the right to receive ideas is a necessary predicate to the recipient’s meaningful exercise of his own rights of speech, press, and political freedom.”

Through technology, most Iowa kids, but not all, have more options than I did in the 1970s to find the world beyond the windows of their school library. But Iowa’s central mission of educating its children is not served by indiscriminately limiting those ideas; it should never be the mission of Iowa’s educational system to inform students they must go elsewhere to find the broad range of expression that will shape who they become.

Even if judges don’t eventually see the wisdom in this, I hope Iowans will.

This column was originally published by Ed Tibbetts’ Along the Mississippi newsletter on Substack. It is republished here through the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative.

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