Banning Books

Yesterday, NBC carried a story about a school district in Alaska that had voted to remove from its curriculum five works: The Great Gatsby, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Catch-22, The Things They Carried, and Invisible Man. (Link to the story.)

I used two of those books at Western Reserve Academy, where I taught high school juniors the final decade of my career. I taught Gatsby each of those years, Invisible Man in 2003-04, when it was the "summer reading" book for my students.

I have read the three others.

Let's pause a moment ...

My belief is that school is a place to learn about things you don't already know--about different ways of thinking--and believing--about other times, other cultures, other ways. It's not a place designed to reinforce what you already think; it's a place for you to think about what you already think. To investigate, to analyze, to consider, to modify--even improve--your knowledge, your critical faculties.

I taught a number of students over my forty-five-year career who seemed perfectly content with what they already knew, believed, thought. I can't say I convinced a lot of them to do otherwise--but I certainly tried.

I was fortunate in my own schooling years to have a large number of teachers who saw it as their charge to show us that the world is a wide, wide (and round!) place, where, throughout history, people have had myriads of perspectives on what it all means--on what we're doing here--on what we should be doing here.

It wasn't always easy to hear or learn about those things. Many of them were challenges (sometimes convincing challenges) to what I had thought all of this was all about.

I learned to see literature as a way to see the world through the eyes of others.  Great literature yanks wide our eyes, jolts awake our minds, informs our hearts.

And all five of the books on that list of banishments do precisely that.

The Great Gatsby (1925) takes us back to the Roaring Twenties--to a time of great wealth (and poverty), optimism, belief that the good times are permanent. We see all sorts of madness on display--Gatsby's idealization of Daisy (who, like the eponymous flower, is attractive--but common), Tom Buchanan's vile racial attitudes, Nick Carraway's dissolving naivete, infidelities of all sorts. And we see the consequences.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), is poet Maya Angelou's memoir about her growing-up years, her experiences as a young black woman, her discovery that, for her, literature is salvation.

Catch-22 (1961), Joseph Heller's wild novel about the madness of war. Yossarian, the protagonist, is a bombardier in WW II, and he sees insanity all around him (even the names of characters are bizarre--e.g., Lt. Scheisskopf ["shithead" in German], Col. Korn).

The Things They Carried (1990) is a collection of connected short stories by Tim O'Brien, stories about the Vietnam War in which he served. In these tales we see the extremes of human experience in warfare--humanity stretched to the snapping point.

Invisible Man, 1952, is Ralph Ellison's powerful novel about growing up black in America. We learn about Southern poverty (and unspeakable cruelty), about living in Harlem, about the oppressive forces that weighed so heavily on his unnamed narrator.

Speaking for myself now ... all of these books illuminated parts of the world, of history, of life in America about which I knew virtually nothing. I was a white kid who grew up in Oklahoma when segregation was still in force. (In Enid, we had the Full-Meal Deal: back-of-the-bus, separate drinking fountains, restrooms, parks, schools).

Although my father went to war (WW II and Korea--though, for the latter, he remained here in the US), I  did not. During the Vietnam War I had a teacher deferment (there was a shortage in the mid-1960s).

I had no contact whatsoever with the Jay-Gatsby kind of world. My parents were both teachers. Financially, we got by. (No wild parties in the back yard! No one dancing the Charleston!)

So ... reading each of those books flung open the shutters of my ignorance to show me views of the world I had never encountered, never even really much thought about.

Those books, in other words, educated me.

I hope that Alaska school board reconsiders its dim decision. They are not protecting their young with such a ban; they are locking them up in a room that has no windows.