Sara Stenson was a middle school librarian in Texas for many years. In this post, she calls on Governor Gregg Abbott to stop dragging school librarians into his culture wars with false and salacious claims.
She writes:
Librarians, as public servants, have no secrets. Anyone can access our online library catalogs. It is also important to note that the existence of a book in a library in no way signifies endorsement. Our job is to provide access to our communities and not only to materials which match our personal tastes or values. For example, children have access to “Mein Kampf” by Adolph Hitler in school libraries in Texas. A quick search of the Austin ISD catalog reveals that in the entire district, serving 77,000 students, four copies of “The Dream House” and three copies of “Gender Queer” are on our high school library shelves. And Austin is a liberal city. I suspect only a handful of these two titles exist in Texas school libraries….
Even the legal definition of pornography in Texas states that the term applies to “any visual or written material that depicts lewd or sexual acts and is intended to cause sexual arousal.” Neither book fits this definition.
Just because a book includes some mature content does not make it pornography. School districts have policies for dealing with book challenges, and these should be followed before any books are removed from the shelves.
Does the book have value as a whole? Does it serve certain students in the community? It depends on the local community and if the book is age-appropriate to the patrons. Do librarians make mistakes? I did. At times, I ordered books that ended up not being appropriate for my middle-school library and passed them up to high-school collections. Librarians choose books for their collections by consulting summaries and reviews in selection aids. They cannot possibly read each book entirely before it is ordered…
“The government — in this case, a public school — cannot restrict speech because it does not agree with the content of that speech,” the Bill of Rights Institute says in summarizing the case. “The decisions called libraries places for ‘voluntary inquiry’ and concluded that the school board’s ‘absolute discretion’ over the classroom did not extend to the library for that reason.” “Voluntary” is the key that protects libraries and our freedom to read.
As Kurt Vonnegut wrote in the censorship wars of his day: “If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.”
Read more at: https://www.star-telegram.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/other-voices/article256049972.html#storylink=cpy
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Other than a few letters, the main difference between librarians and libertarians is that the librarians actually believe in freedom of speech.
“Madam Disciplinarian”
The public has librarians
To help the kids find books
The Right has disciplinarians
To punish dirty looks
I posted a link to this at OEN https://www.opednews.com/Quicklink/Governor-Abbott-Stop-Smea-in-Best_Web_OpEds-Diane-Ravitch_Freedom_Freedom-Of-Speech_Inquiry-211127-954.html#comment799107
Abbott is just stirring up the stew pot of GOP nihilism with ever more lies and exaggerated claims so he can gain votes. He doesn’t care about books, school libraries or school librarians, it’s just destroy, destroy and destroy some more.
Is there any hope in Texas that it can escape GOP control of the government and state for like 5 minutes, maybe?
There is no hope for Texas
As Stevie Ray Vaughn sang
It”s floodin down in Texas
All the telephone lines are down
Well, it’s floodin down in Texas
All the telephone lines are down
And I tried to call on Reason
But I can’t get a single sound
Well dark clouds are rollin’ in
Man I’m standin’ out in the rain
Well dark clouds are rollin’ in
Man I’m standin’ out in the rain
Yeah flood water keep a rollin’
Man it’s about to drive poor me insane
Well I’m leavin’ you baby
Lord and I’m goin’ back home to stay
Well I’m leavin’ you baby
Lord and I’m goin’ back to stay
Well back home are no floods or Gregg Abbotts
Baby and the sun shines every day
Oh yes. ❤ me some Stevie Ray!
There are many states in the U.S. that are teetering on the brink of bluing, Texas being one of them. But, alas, things look really bad for 2022 and 2024, and that, folks, is what the end of the semi-democratic experiment in the United States looks like.
so true: not a personal interest but a party game
Washington Post 11/27/21 By Alexandra Petri
I regret to say they are putting the books back on the shelves now in Virginia, the threatened books, the banned ones. They have evaluated them and found them to contain no threat. This is no good. Such books are bad. Books follow you home and pry open your head and rearrange the things inside. They make you feel things, sometimes, hope and grief and shame and confusion.
Let me tell you about something that a book did: It convinced me that the things inside it were true; it told me so many lies that I started to believe it. I loved it; it infuriated me; I broke its spine in half. Books have taken me into dark woods and the bellies of whales and spat me out dazed and blinking into my own living room and knocked me around backward and forward through time and delivered me gossip from the distant past and facts from the recent present.
Books give you recipes for living, and some of the recipes are good and others taste foul the first time you try them. You read them with friends and come away with entirely different ideas of what has happened. They are uncontainable, uncontrollable, except if you never open them.
Burning them is odd. You would think that objects of such power would give off extraordinary heat or light, or explode, but they just burn as though unaware of what they are made of. They go off shelves and onto banned lists in the same manner, quietly, as though not conscious of their power. You are right to be frightened of them, and it is very bad they are being brought back. You will realize they are much too dangerous when you think of all they can do.
Sorry, am unfamiliar with most names of journalists, pundits,,… I am probably showing my ignorance, but I assume this is a satirical piece. too many publications behind pay walls, not that that is not understandable.
Thanks for sharing this, Ms. Irwin!
Books are essential to thinking in my opinion. While some folks may prefer reading on a screen than a book, 33 different studies have shown that students tend to absorb material better when they read a book. Screens cannot adequately replace
teachers, and they do a poor job of replacing books for most learners. https://hechingerreport.org/evidence-increases-for-reading-on-paper-instead-of-screens/
My grandson is in middle school in a public school in Texas. I am shocked and dismayed that he brings home no books. Any homework assignments are on-line, and they are submitted electronically. As a student, I can remember poring over my texts to review material and prepare for tests. They were my anchor, particularly in math which I tended to process more slowly than other subjects. I also read a wide array of fiction in middle school and high school. I cannot help but think that we are short changing our young people by jumping on the electronic learning bandwagon without fully understanding the consequences. I am wondering if some newer teacher believe that teaching is plugging in students to their devices. If this is true, we can expect a diminished return on learning while we enrich education tech businesses. Maybe I am just a product of the last century, but I believe book free schools are like heartless people.
In Los Angeles, libraries were closed under Broadie Superintendent John Deasy a decade ago. We had to go on strike to get librarians back. At my school, admin hired someone from a standardized testing department as the librarian. She is helping admin replace the books with computer terminals. Eli Broad was a Democrat. Demonizing literature and libraries has been going on for some time and the attack is ambidextrous.
Sarah,
As Sarte puts it, VALUE arises simply from
our choices. WHAT we choose, we value simply
because we have chosen it, and apparently we
remain scot-free, at any moment, to NONVALUE
it by simply UN-choosing it.
In other words, we do not choose because we
see the value of something. We see the value
in something because we have chosen it.
You can’t control the wind
(or hot air from snollygosters) BUT
you can “set” your sails.
Give credit where credit is due.
Credit NOT the “puff” of a “poofer”…
Every local school district should have a policy for library and textbook selection and reconsideration.
The ALA has excellent resources!
Policy! A step-by-step procedure IN POLICY for reconsideration of a book.
and the best part (I used to love asking complainants this question even before handing them the form): “HAVE YOU READ THE ENTIRE BOOK?”
Example “complaint form” and excerpts from the form and a policy.
https://www.ala.org/tools/challengesupport/selectionpolicytoolkit/sampleforms
3. Have you examined the entire resource? If not, what sections did you review?
4. What concerns you about the resource?
5. Are there resource(s) you suggest to provide additional information and/or other viewpoints on this topic?
Review the complaint carefully.
Was the form completed by an individual with personal concerns or a person representing a group?
Look at the reason(s) for the challenge.
Has the individual read the entire resource or only specified parts? What action is the person requesting?
continued….
Have you examined the entire resource?
Yes, I looked at the whole thing from across the room.
What concerns you about the resource?
The cover is purple. It promotes homosexuality.
Are there resource(s) you suggest to provide additional information and/or other viewpoints on this topic?
Yes, The Index Librorum Prohibitorum.
I have been begging school libraries for decades to show me the good stuff, but will they? Nope. I’m losing patience here.
I would have been begging school librarians to do this if there still were school libraries and school librarians in the places where I taught–if these hadn’t been replaced by media centers fully commandeered for taking state standardized tests and practice tests for those tests.
During the heyday, in the 1980s and ’90s, of Mel and Norma Gablers’ censorship crusade against books via a weaponized Texas State Textbook Adoption Committee, all the 12th-grade literature texts from the competing educational publishers–Brit Lit survey books–contained the Andrew Marvell classic, canonical poem “To His Coy Mistress,” which contains these lines:
But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound marble vault: tomb
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust;
The bit about worms trying “that long-preserved virginity” has to be one of the most vivid, grotesque, and hilarious lines in all of literature in the English language.
But this poem had the following going for it: it’s rather long, and I doubt the Gablers could read beyond, say, the Trump level, so it’s doubtful that they read this poem at all or, if they did, understood it. So, it escaped their fine-toothed-combing for Satanic influences. And I doubt they or Governor Abbott would have gotten the pun in Chaucer’s “So pricketh hem Nature in hir corages,” (hem = them; hir = their; corages = hearts), which is embedded in a lovely evocation of the awakening of fecundity and fertility and high spirits in Spring. And don’t get me started on the scene under the pear tree in Their Eyes Were Watching God:
“She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!” –The divine Zora Neale Hurston
There are times when one reads a passage and says, “That’s as good as it gets.”
This. This passage from Zora.