The Language Police: Censorhip from the Right

We shall now cover the actual censorship.  We will start with censorship from the Right.  Now we will be careful with the use of the word “censorship”, since teachers have a responsibility to select their textbook material carefully.

To describe censorship, we shall use the words of Ravitch: “Censorship occurs when school officials or publishers (acting in anticipation of the legal requirements of certain states) delete words, ideas, and topics from textbooks and tests for no reason other than their fear of controversy.”  (Ravitch, 62)

Several decades of this is all it takes to make a difference. "During the 1980s and 1990s, and after, there were numerous challenges to books by parents and organized groups" (Ravitch, 74) Ravitch lists the following:

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain.
The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank
Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Deliverance by James Dickey
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
The Good Earth by Pearl Buck
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
A Hero Ain't Nothin' by a Sandwhich by Alice Childress
If Beale Street Could Talk by James Baldwin

It is understandable why these books would be selected, as many of them are hardly suitable for elementary school or even high school readers, but there is a difference between simply encouraging teachers to be responsible, & actually basically forcing teachers to not even select these.

While censorship from the Right has descreased considerably over the years, it still left an impact on education that is still present, or was present until some point within the lifetimes of many of my readers, & thusly is worth discussion.  “Censors on the right aim to restore an idealized version of the past, an Arcadia of happy family life, in which the family was intact, comprising a father, a mother, and two or more children, and went to church every Sunday.” (Ravitch, 63)  This may not sound so bad at first, as this is more or less a healthy family…until you discover just how far they went to ensure this image.

We will not neglect the increasingly intense censorship of the Left; after all, “censors from the left believe in an idealized vision of the future, a utopia in which egalitarianism prevails in all social relations.”  (Ravitch, 63) However, because we intend on going through Ravitch’s takes on censorship in the proper order of her book, we shall start with censorship from the Right first.  But bear in mind, we will cover both, as “neither wants children and adolescents to encounter books, textbooks, or videos that challenge their vision of what was or what might be, or that depict a reality contrary to that vision.” (Ravitch, 63)

Whereas my perspectives lean Right, the author’s bias leans Left.  She told many stories, because "as a student in the Houston public schools, [she] had firsthand experience with the political pressures exerted by extreme right-wing forces." (Ravitch, 64) She had all kinds of fascinating stories, whuch as when she "was in junior high school and high school, a right-wing group called the Minute Women of the USA wreaked havoc on the school system with a campaign of intimidation and name-calling." (Ravitch, 64) However, one story that happened long after this, after the author's youth, which had nothing to do with the Minute Women, in particular stood out to me.

Things got especially difficult when the Impressions series was released around 2000.  “The Impressions series consisted of grade-by-grade anthologies with a cumulative total of more than eight hundred reading selections from authors such as C.S. Lewis, Lewis Carrol, the Brothers Grimm, Rudyard Kipling, Martin Luther King Jr., and Laura Ingris Wilder.”  (Ravitch, 75)  Basically, the goal was to replace schoolhouse traditions like Dick & Jane, with real literature for children.  We actually had a solution to the long problem of dumbed-down literature for children, one that would encourage higher literary skills for children & improve literacy.  So why are many young students today so unfamiliar with Narnia & Wonderland?

Enter the Religious Right.  This happened to be not too terribly long after the apex of their influence.

They were offended at the frequent depictions of the supernatural (probably Narnia was the most upsetting to them, which was ironic as it was written by an openly devout Anglican who used his Narnia books to show nothing more or less than how God would act in an alternate reality; you can’t make this stuff up).  “They charged that the series was promoting a New Age religion of paganism, the occult, and witchcraft” (Ravitch, 76).  Speaking as somebody familiar with numerous religious Right groups, the fiercest opponents were quite possible Charismatic & Apostolic, which makes these charges all the more ironic, as many of the practices of these movements have been understandably construed as almost occult by other Christians.  This situation could very well be construed as practitioners of Christianized occult accusing a more traditional Christian of promoting the occult. 

If parents who would want Narnia banned from schools have trouble with magic, “they would have had equal difficulty adjusting to the literary anthologies in American public schools one hundred years ago, which customarily included myths and legends, stories about disobedient children, even tales of magical transformation.”  (Ravitch, 77)  One could say that between this fact, & also how strongly religious Dominionism (as opposed to religious Fundamentalism) was associated with Democrats & even Communists (the Jesus Freaks come to mind), & how looking at how secular both Donald Trump & much of his support has been, one could say that the religious Right of the vein that Ravitch refers to in this particular instance was actually a very short-lived movement (not to say that there are other religious Right movements that existed long before & will exist long after, but their tenants & actions are quite different from censorship advocates)…

...But a short-lived movement with a tremendous amount of power over public opinion of the country during its heyday.

While “public ridicule helped to squelch some of the ardor of those who wanted to censor books” (Ravitch, pg 76), one cannot help but notice that “even though the religious right has consistently lost court battles, its criticisms have not been wasted on education publishers.”  (Ravitch, 77)  As a result, the Impressions series was not republished again.

 Textbook publishers will sadly often avoid any risks at all, because stigma can come even if they win legal cases.  In other words, “death to their product” (Ravitch, 78)