Leader of the Banned
“Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.” — Stephen Chbosky
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When Stephen Chbosky’s movie The Perks of Being a Wallflower debuted in 2012, I was teaching English at a high school in Coweta County. The film, featuring Emma Watson and Logan Lerman, generated quite a following amongst our student population and sparked a near-cult hysteria around Chbosky’s novel. There was even a waiting list for the book because the library couldn’t keep it on the shelves.
And then all of a sudden the book was no longer on the shelves for a very different reason. District office personnel had informed all high school media specialists to remove the novel because of its “explicit” content.
I have no idea if Perks is back in circulation in Coweta County, but I do know that they were not alone in their decision to ban the title. Chbosky’s book has appeared on the American Library Association’s (ALA) list of Top Ten most frequently challenged books 8 times since 2004.
Several years later, I left Coweta behind and headed to a high school in Carroll County. As I began planning for the new school year, I inquired about grade-level reading lists and the process to have a book approved for whole-class instruction. No protocol was in place; no document existed, but the entire English department told me that you couldn’t teach William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying because it had been banned at Bowdon High School an indeterminate number of years ago and whether or not it was written down anywhere didn’t matter at all because this fact was now local gospel.
I had no desire to parade Addie Bundren’s tragedy through my class of juniors, but I was intrigued and confused by this casual and off-handed disregard for any sort of committee or approval process. And my disquiet wasn’t reserved solely for the teachers; I wondered how parents and community members figured into this equation.
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Just last week I attended the ELFPA Undergraduate Research Conference at the University of West Georgia to hear my daughter present her senior seminar paper. Part of each session was devoted to questions and answers, and several professors asked the presenters about the appropriateness of the texts they discussed for secondary students, and more than once, someone referenced Toni Morrison’s frequently banned novel Beloved. I tip my hat to these professors who try to guide prospective teachers through the battered landscape of America’s libraries and classrooms.
All of these discussions arrive on the heels of Banned Book Week 2023 (October 1- 7). In September of this year, the ALA reported that there had been “nearly 700 attempts to ban library books in the first eight months of 2023 . . . a 20% increase compared to the same months in 2022.”
It’s a fine line that teachers, parents, and administrators alike trod these days regarding students’ exposure to the written word, a balance between independence and protection, self-discovery and “safety.”
How much power can (should) one parent have with regard to children’s access to literature? Around the same time that Perks came out, I received a parent complaint about a text I was teaching in my classroom -- a text I had taught for years and still teach today. The mother told me in a fairly heated conversation that she did not want her daughter exposed to the “evils and witchcraft” in the play I was teaching. The offending text? Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Our children are exposed to so much content these days through social media and other online content, but it seems that the school libraries and the classrooms have moved from functioning as safe spaces to battlegrounds. Parents seek to control their children’s access to content that touches on LGBTQIA2S+ issues, homosexuality, suicide, abortion, alcohol and drug use, irreligion, and racial inequity, while librarians often find themselves the gatekeepers of books that students may seek out to find relatability, kinship, and validation.
Oftentimes, the books our society wishes to ban are the very ones that our kids need to read and discuss with you, their parents, grandparents, and caregivers. It’s a perfect opportunity to open a dialogue about difficult topics that plague our adolescents. Every day they’re bombarded with pressure and messages about what they should believe and who they should be. Should we prohibit them from discovering who they can become? Or should we shelter them from the pressures of society and keep them innocent as long as possible?
Though I don’t know the fate of The Perks of Being a Wallflower in Coweta County, I do know that the media specialists there keep Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale behind the desk until someone asks for it AND has a parent note for permission.
Should one parent hold enough power to remove a title from the shelves? Are you okay allowing one parent to make those decisions for you and your child?
Are we hypocritical if we claim we want less government interference yet still allow librarians and county office personnel to pull books at will?
How does your local school decide which books are taught and banned? Is there a process in place? Does your school have a media committee composed of parents, students, teachers, and administrators who work on the behalf of our students?
As a community, we need robust public discourse and a commitment to diverse viewpoints. Together, we can navigate the complexities of literature and provide guidance for our students who feel marginalized, vulnerable, and alone. And honestly, doesn’t that describe them all?
