We have all watched the attack on literature unfold in the state of Florida at the behest of Governor Ron DeSantis. It was just reported yesterday that a school in Miami-Dade County, Florida banned Amanda Gorman’s poem that was turned into a book, “The Hill We Climb,” for elementary school students.
Amanda Gorman read this exact poem to the crowd at President Joe Biden’s inauguration. “I’m gutted,” the former and first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate wrote on Instagram about the Bob Graham Education Center’s decision to ban her work from their students. The decision was made after one parent complained, Gorman wrote.
She also went to Twitter, saying, “So they ban my book from young readers . . fail to specify what parts of my poetry they object to, refuse to read any reviews, and offer no alternatives. Unnecessary #bookbans like these are on the rise, and we must fight back.”
Attached to Gorman’s tweet is a copy of the complaint from the parent. It states that her book “is not educational” and “contains hate messages.” The form, also tweeted by The Florida Freedom to Read Project, says the complainant believes the purpose of the book is to “cause confusion and Indoctrinate students.”
It’s unbelievable that one parent’s issue with a piece of subjective literature can change the entire curriculum and have the work in question banned. This line of thought assumes that our children have no critical thinking skills and censors ideas that the minority of the population doesn’t agree with.
I knew this was happening in Florida but had no clue that book banning was going on at this level in my home state of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is apparently third in the nation for banning books, behind Texas and Florida.
Across the state, there are 456 book bans from nine different school districts. Most of the topics are related to race and LGBTQ issues and include many books by prominent Black authors.
Pennsylvania is also home to the district with the most book bans in the nation. Central York School District in York County, PA holds that title.
“In Pennsylvania, we have seen a few districts get really deep into this issue. One of the places that started a lot of this energy was Central York,” said Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression and education at PEN America and lead author of the report “Banned in the USA: The Growing Movement to Censor Books in Schools.”
“The list of books that needed to be banned (was) essentially a list to encourage inclusivity and diversity. … They included a Sesame Street special on racism, and whole book series. (One book) about a black protagonist.”
Book bans are defined by PEN America as action taken against a title by parents, community groups or administration based on the book’s content. PEN America also considers a district’s decision to pull a book based on direct or threatened action from lawmakers a “ban.”
“In Pennridge (School District in Bucks County), they moved … ‘Heather Has Two Mommies’ … to the guidance offices and counseling offices. We count that also as a book ban, because rather than the book being accessible to students in the library, it is being banished to the guidance centers,” Friedman said.
Between July 2021 and June 2022, 2,532 books were banned by 138 districts in 32 states, including 11 Pennsylvania school districts, according to the report. A total of 1,648 individual titles were pulled from districts, impacting the work of 1,553 authors, illustrators and translators.
Anastasia Higginbotham’s White Raven Book Award-winning “Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness” was a book used as an example in Texas on the legislative floor when discussing HB 3979.
“They were using my book to shut other people out. That’s exactly the opposite of what I was trying to do,” said Higginbotham, whose book is an invitation to white children and adults to join in the legacy of fighting for social justice.
“There is such a thing as bad publicity. Sales are down. People do steer clear of it. People are afraid of losing their funding, losing their jobs. Librarians, teachers, they do shy away from it. They’re afraid of drawing the attention of Proud Boys, of Moms For Liberty,” Higginbotham said. “People will say specifically that my book ‘Not My Idea’ makes white kids feel bad about being white. My response to that is, are you also concerned about Black and brown kids feeling bad about being Black and brown? It’s not irony, it’s tragedy. It’s overt racism … and hatred of LGBTQ people and Muslims and Jews and it’s so overt.”
The idea that white kids won’t be able to handle hearing stories about what their ancestors did to people of color is the soft bigotry of low expectations. This applies to all kids. Some adults think that they can’t handle some of these topics, such as sexuality and racism. If they only knew what their pre-teens and teenagers talk about amongst their friends, they might change their minds.
The only remedy for ignorance is education. The only way to ensure that history isn’t repeated is to teach the wrongs of the past. Banning books is basically removing the tools our kids need to understand the world around them.
In Central York School District, a deeply divided school board meeting was held this month over book banning. The supporters of banning books believe that there are books that are completely inappropriate for children in the school’s libraries, and they need to be removed. The dissenters believe that what a child reads should be up to their parents and that each individual family should have the ability to make those decisions.
The controversy at Central York stems from a drafted policy manual known as Library Resources 109.1, which outlines new policies that could limit student access to various reading materials.
The manual states that the parents of students have the right to limit reading materials at the school. Under this policy, parents can submit a complaint about any book or reading material that they oppose. This can lead to a book being removed from school and library shelves.
“You cannot determine what my child can and cannot handle, you have no idea about my child,” said Amy Milsten of the Central York School District. “It is an actual infringement of our first amendment rights, of our children’s First Amendment rights. It is an infringement of freedom of speech.”
“We, as the district, have the right to choose what we house here as a district and anything we don’t house,” said Vickie Guth of the Central York School District.
Opponents of the arcane book-banning policies say that there are other ways to limit access to certain books, which can be done through the school’s library system if parents are set on preventing their children from reading certain materials.
The district dealt with controversy over what some describe as “book banning” before. In 2021, an email was sent to teachers with a list of educational materials they were told not to use in the classroom, which included dozens of books about race and racism, mostly by Black authors.
“Those books that were already in our libraries weren’t removed from our libraries,” said Nicole Montgomery, director of communications and marketing for the Central York School District.
Recently, three more books have received complaints and may be taken out of Central York schools. “One for ‘Push’ by Sapphire, one for ‘A Quart of Mist and Fury’ by Sarah J Mass, and then sold by Patricia McCormick,” Montgomery added.
As of today, the controversial books remain on library shelves in the Central York School District while the adoption of Policy 109.1 is pending.
Parents need to understand that they’re doing a disservice to their children by removing books from the school’s curriculum. These issues that parents don’t think kids can handle, such as racism and dealing with the LGBTQ community, are not going away anytime soon.
Kids, especially kids that have had a sheltered upbringing, need to know what’s happening in our country. Gay people exist and knowing that will not make you become gay. Racism exists and knowing that should make you want to learn more to see how you can become a part of the solution. We all suffer when part of our population is ignorant of real-life experiences.
Those who suffer the most are the people that live those realities every day.
If you people, don’t want your children to read a book, that is solely your choice. We have technology that would allow these school libraries to ban children from checking those books out. Taking the entire book out of the school is authoritarianism!!!
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