Censorship in High Schools

Last week, Chicagoland news outlets swarmed a suburban high school district as one board member attempted to remove "objectionable" reading material from the 2006-2007 curriculum. After nearly five hours of debate, the rest of the school board sided against her, and approved the list in its original form.

My first problem with this particular challenge is that the board member who started this buhaha had never read any of the books she objected to. Instead, she relied on excerpts taken out of context to make her decision. Using that logic, she should also have objected to exposing teens to the Bible. The Song of Solomon, in particular, is quite racy. But did the Bible make her chopping list? No. What a surprise.

My second problem is that this school board member didn't trust teachers to do their jobs. The first goal of any high school teacher should be to prepare students to survive in the real world, not some cleaned-up rendition that the Religious Right seems to want to force-feed our children.

Think about it. Do you want your military to be made up of young men and women who've never been exposed to the realities of war? Would you hire a real estate agent who can't comprehend the impact of a nearby meth lab on the dream home you want to buy? Would you put your life in the hands of a surgeon who doesn't believe HIV/AIDS is a problem, and who doesn't follow appropriate sterilization procedures?

Let's put this another way. Do you want your grandchildren raised by parents who don't know there are child molesters out there and therefore don't protect your grandchildren appropriately?

Sexuality, war, and crime are all tough topics, and I know we all wish that we don't have to expose our children to them. But we're not doing kids any favors by putting them in a bubble. Eventually they're going to decide to become soldiers, real estate agents, or doctors. Do you really want your child deciding to go into one of these fields, only to find out after years of hard training and/or expensive education that there are these tough realities they're going to have to face every day? Do you want to watch them fold under the pressure?

Juniors and Seniors in high school are making important decisions about the rest of their lives. We call them "young adults" for a reason -- because they're ready to start having talented guides expose them to these realities of our world and teach them how to cope. That's the job of a high school teacher. And it's the job of a high school board member to make sure that the curriculum and teachers are up to this task. It is absolutely not the job of the school board to insulate our next generation of police officers, lawyers, and judges from the very idea of serial rapists and murderers.

I do not necessarily advocate allowing children to read such material on their own. These are tough topics and may require an adult's guidance in order to interpret them appropriately. If parents aren't up to that task, then they can leave it to the professionals in the school. Feel free to ban it from the home in any context other than schoolwork.

Those who disagree, those who want their adult children to fold at the first sign of "evil" in the world, can choose to send their children to parochial school, homeschool, or opt-out of such content through an established procedure force-fed to every public school by the Religious Right.

But do not enforce your bubble on my children. Try it, and your children will learn about conflict first-hand.