This has been a banner year for book banning.
CBS News published a brief description of the 50 most banned books this years. Most, as you will see, are about sexuality, gender and race. Parents and activists fear that children will become what they read about. They worry that reading about gay students will turn their children gay. Why would they worry that their children become racist.
This surge in censorship is a testament of sorts to the power of the written word. The peculiar thing about this crusade to ban books is that far more explicit material about sexuality and race is readily available on the internet.
Censorship of books, textbooks, even standardized tests is not new. I wrote a book called The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn. The pressure groups come from the right and the left and from groups claiming to represent the elderly, women, religious folk, and all sorts of others. Every publisher of textbooks and tests has “bias and sensitivity” guidelines, long lists of words, phrases, topics, and images that will never appear in a textbook or on a test. I have a list at the end of the book that includes more than 800 banned items.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I have news for these effing banning morons who fight tooth and nail when it comes to the 1st Amendment protecting their right to lie/threaten.
Children will hit adolescence sooner or later with a rush of hormones that will drive most of them crazy with lust.
Censoring books isn’t going to change what’s hardwired in our DNA to insure our species doesn’t go extinct from lack of interest.
My father-in-law, a Chinese citizen living in China, is in his 90s now (meaning he stays home), and he used to lecture about the history of Chinese astronomy. When he was lecturing in the San Francisco Bay Area at some local college when Q&A time came, one Caucasian American asked him if Chinese kissed. Go figure. A question about kissing after an astronomy presentation. But this is the US where free speech means anything goes to some people.
His answer. “Of course, how do you think we ended up with more than a billion people.”
Haaa!!!! What a wonderful story, Lloyd!
Polonius: what do you read, m’lord?
Hamlet: why, words,words
So wonderful. Shakespeare stole the line from Erasmus’s Colloquies, which he studied as a lad in grammar school. (Something I unearthed.) The altogether wonderful, brilliant Robin Lithgow has a book about the Erasmus/Shakespeare connection and Elizabethan schooling and other wonderful matters coming out soon.
Erasmus and Shakespeare. Erasmus vs Luther. European culture is full of links of influence and debate. I wonder if there were Chinese and Indian writers whose influences spread similarly through their cultures. Europe is rich with these relationships.
The Colloquies were used to teach rhetorical techniques, and Shakespeare was an apt pupil. THE major characteristic of his work is the piling of one trope on top of another, fast and furious. All learned from the wonderful wit of Erasmus. Robin Lithgow has done an outstanding of job of bringing this forward and showing the world what Shakesepare’s grammar school education in the art of writing and drama did for our literature and language. She’s just amazing. xoxoxoxox!!!! A brilliant scholar with a wonderful sense of humor.
“Parents and activists fear that children will become what they read about.” Millions of women read Gone with the Wind and didn’t become Southern belles.
And do waste their time when they could be learning an instrument or cultivating their garden
Haaaa!!!! That’s a wonderful observation, booklady!!!
The peculiar thing about this crusade to ban books is that far more explicit material about sexuality and race is readily available on the internet.”
..being regularly downloaded by the Evangelical” hypocrites banning the books.
Pornvangelicsls.
I think I related the experience of a friend of mine who moved to a house neat Bob Jones College in Greenville. He began to notice that the magazine sales at convince markets were way more stocked with perve lit than similar stores a farther distance from the campus. Boys will be boys.
Puritans will be Purvitans
“being regularly downloaded by the Evangelical” hypocrites banning the books”
Many years ago, a fellow was arrested for possession of pornography in Salt Lake City, which had strict laws against it. At the time, the Supreme Court had advanced a “community standards” rule regarding what was or wasn’t pornographic. So, the defense counsel subpoenaed the records of local hotels and showed in court that the good Mormon men of Salt Lake were checking themselves into hotels, alone, solely so they could watch the porn on the in-room movie systems. The defense won.
You can tell that these are hypocrites because the actions of the Trumps and Gaetzes and Fallwells don’t bother them in the least.
Don’t ever make a deal with an Evangelical.
Even if you deliver everything they had hoped for and more
they will stab you in the back quicker than you can say Evangelical if they think you have become a liability.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-2024-christian-right-abortion-1234636072/
It’s like making a deal with Satan in more ways than one.
Add Diane’s “Language Police…” to the this list of books I want to read.
So many books and so little time.
BTW not sure if the link above was meant to be to Diane’s book?
I found it on Amazon, anyway.
And, good point about the staying power of the written word. Something to be truly grateful for this week.
A wonderful book. I highly recommend it.
So many books. Good point, John. I just finished a novel: Where the Crawdads Sing. Also read Juneteenth, by Ellison, this fall. First fiction in a long while unless you count right wing news. Hope the lake effect snows recently avoided you
Roy, because I always had so many student papers to grade and also since I tend to read nonfiction, I found that I was reading faster and faster, zooming through text. Add to that the speed in which words fly off scrolling computer screens.
It’s kind of like those vampire movies where they talk about the “un-dead”. I had become an un-reader, ha, ha. I could vacuum in large amounts of information and get the ‘big picture’ but the beauty of words and all sorts of details were being left behind in the dust. I didn’t feel totally…alive. (Ah, the life of a teacher these days.)
A few years ago I started reading classic works of fiction during the summer in an attempt to slow my brain down. Or, at times I’ll read things aloud to make myself really pay attention.
Of course, nothing like a warm, cozy chair and a good book when the snow piles up. A nap is the true antidote to the pace of life in 2022.
I’ve been ‘battening down the hatches’ here, getting ready for real winter. We’re far enough from Buffalo that lake effect snow tends to just coat the roads once in while.
All the best for Thanksgiving to you and everyone here.
Thank you, John. Enjoy your winter reading.
Roy, John, Happy Thanksgiving to you and yours!
I only have four of the top 50 on my classroom shelves. How embarrassing. I’m going to have to add some titles. And a big middle finger, flip a big bird, a Big Bird middle finger to all the Republican billionaires lighting the fuse under red states over this. Fools tried to ban Sesame Street. And my credit score probably dropped from nearly perfect after a bill I mailed was tossed in the bin when Ex President tried to ban the Post Office. Fools. Someone needs to cancel banning. Or ban canceling. Something like that. Fools.
Ban bannin’
…and Bannon.
Teachers: please make sure to copy these lists and distribute them to your students with stern warnings for students to avoid them at all costs.
In the district in which I teach, the day of Thanksgiving break, we received a list from our librarian (not their fault) of books that had to be immediately off shelves. Most of them by and/or about LGBTQ themes. The state has determined that they have “no redeeming value.” Charming, huh?
Now the state has to disconnect the Internet.
!!!!!!
One of my favorite books ever. Shows how implicit discrimination of view points can taint both left and right zealots. We must be vigilant.
I have some news for the American Taliban Morality Police: You can’t unscramble an egg. Our culture has left you far, far behind. You can completely pull out the stops with regard to intimidation and state violence and still, still, you and your ancient superstitions and unreal and hypocritical moralizing will be rejected, utterly, by your children. I only hope that eventually they will learn how to forgive you while still rejecting everything that you represent.
They count on “Christ’s forgiveness” to save them, but I suspect that even Christ has his limit, and these hypocrites passed it long ago.
They had just better pray there is no Hell.
I ask myself when reading about the theofascists: WWJD?
LINA: Those people back in the 21st century were woesome wackers.
TEACHER: Can you be a little more precise, Lina? In what way or ways were they wackers?
LINA: Dodat. Nack this. They totally bloofed when someone wrote about two people of the same sex or gender being sexual. Supdat?
TEACHER: Yes, it was a backward and superstitious and hate-filled time.
RICO: Sometimes it’s a really good thing that history is history.
LINA: Viz.
RICO: Thanks, Lina.
LINA: Yop.
Some were more wackers than others. They were ohsum woesome wackers.
cx: Nackdis.
They know. They’re working on trying to ban the internet too, or at least ban people under 18 from using the internet. For example, here’s one bill they are trying to get added into the end-of-year budget:
eff (dot) org/deeplinks/2022/11/kosa-would-let-government-control-what-young-people-see-online
I work in a very small K-6 school with a pretty small library. I pulled the books I had that were on the most banned lists and highlighted them with the 4-6 students. Most were appalled that some of their favorite books were “banned”. Had lots of check-outs that week.
Wonderful teaching, Sharon!!!
On May 10, 1933 at the book burning ceremony led by Goebbels, there were many who surreptitiously–not too, it seems–hid some books under their coats and jackets. Which can’t help but lead one to wonder how many of these book banning freaks have their own private stashes. Did they return them to the library after they did in-depth studies of each and every book? Perhaps they even learned something.
Being these creepy, narrow-minded, Puritan people so afraid of the world and of experience is its own punishment. It must be a nightmare to be inside their heads, and our culture in general must freak them out ALL THE TIME. For them, there must be monsters in and under the bed, in every song lyric and film, around every corner.
Strangely, as I ascended the list from the least-banned, I found more & more books I was surprised were banned. Those among the top [most-often-banned] especially. [“A Handmaid’s Tale” movie suggests 16 yo’s & up, yet novel is #22 of 50 most-banned?] A number of them were widely well-received critically and received prestigious literary awards. Perhaps the best-written are the most ‘dangerous’? [Morrison’s ‘The Bluest Eye” especially, which sideswiped me at age 27.] I grant these are books I appreciated immensely as an adult, in many cases beyond middle years– though would have as a college freshman as well. So, one yr earlier as a hisch sr not OK? That’s a dicey line to establish, which should not be drawn by politicians or political activists.