Pleasantville Redux
by Renée Olson, Editor-in-Chief -- School Library Journal, 12/1/1998
A Wisconsin school board makes its high school library "safe" again.
There's a small town in northwestern Wisconsin that wants so badly to escape into a past that never existed.
On September 21, town education officials in Barron, WI, yanked four books -- two novels with homosexual characters and two nonfiction titles on homosexuality -- from high school library shelves after a mother whose children are no longer in school filed a complaint about them.
Three weeks later, Matthew Shepard, the gay University of Wyoming student beaten to within an inch of his life and left to hang on a fence, died.
The school board's decision is especially chilling because two of the censored books -- Bette Greene's The Drowning of Stephan Jones (Bantam, 1991) and Francesca Lia Block's Baby Be-Bop (HarperCollins, 1995) -- feature characters attacked because they're gay.
Communities like Barron aren't directly responsible for the deaths of gays and lesbians, but by making books about gays unacceptable, the board has essentially grabbed a plow and tilled the earth, making it possible for negative attitudes toward the gay community to take root. If school officials believe they removed the books because of community wishes, then why did a reconsideration committee of eight of their fellow residents and educators decide to keep the books on the shelf?
The board also ignored the wishes of its high school librarian, Irene Cooley. "I continue to stand by my decision to buy [the books]," Cooley told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "This has been very frustrating."
If Cooley wasn't already aware that she works for a school district that thinks little of intellectual freedom, she is now. In a four-page letter to the mother who challenged the books, District Administrator Vita Sherry appeared to be hallucinating, convinced that she is employed by a parochial, and not a public school, system. The district, she wrote, cannot "lay out before our students all manner of sexually explicit materials and expect them to form their own opinions without the benefit of guidance from a caring, Christian community."
Still, a hot-button issue like homosexuality makes it easy to lose sight of the bigger issue. Barron's school board is scared that it's about to lose control of its students, like a driver just realizing he's hit a sheet of ice at high speed. In response, school officials cling to indoctrination, restricting students to "materials that... reflect the moral and ethical standards of the community in which we live and work."
Barron's school officials seem nostalgic for a simpler time -- one that opted for the Pleasantville model, with its manufactured happiness and heavy dependence on repression over intellectual inquiry and debate. It reminds me of the fire captain in Fahrenheit 451, who says to Montag, the protagonist and fellow fireman in charge of burning books: "I don't think you realize how important you are, we are, to our happy world as it stands now."
Let's just hope that the board doesn't realize its students use the Internet.
For something that has nothing to do with manufactured happiness and everything to do with genuine wisdom, let's turn to Carolyn Caywood. Despite a deep love of libraries and a true gift for reflection, Caywood, our "Teens and Libraries" columnist, has, in our minds, made a dreadful decision: she's decided to put down her pen and give up her column. After eight years of unforgiving deadlines, she -- inexplicably, I know -- thinks that taking a break and pursuing other interests sounds more appealing. If you've enjoyed her columns, I suggest youbarrage her with e-mail and suggest she write for us occasionally, as the spirit moves her. We'll all miss her voice in these pages.
Renée Olson
Editor-in-Chief
rolson@slj.cahners.com
