Reinforcing Our Values

My eight-year-old son had just finished reading Roald Dahl's James and the Giant Peach, the next notch in his Accelerated Reader belt (I will save the AR debate for another editorial), when I mentioned to him that in some schools, students are prohibited from reading the book, as well as many others including, dare I tell him, Harry Potter. Scrunching up his nose, his face revealed a look of disbelief.

I explained to him that those that seek to censor or ban a book attempt to keep it away from others because they find some of the ideas in the book objectionable. Emboldened by his conviction that there wasn't anything in Peach that a child shouldn't read, he said he didn't think it was fair "to hold kids back from reading certain books." How would he feel if such a situation occurred in his school? "Discouraged, mad, and sad about the school," he replied.

Nowhere does the act of censoring books occur more frequently than in our nation's schools and school libraries, where roughly seven out of 10 of the nearly 7,000 challenges recorded by the American Library Association since 1990 have taken place.

If you haven't noticed, the censorship grip is tightening, by dint of our human nature and the way we often respond when threatened. An impending war, a sputtering economy, the periodic unearthing of new suspected al Qaeda cells, and other assorted regional horrors have wreaked havoc with the nation's already fragile sense of security.

Democratic ideals and their attendant values are endangered in states that perceive themselves as consistently under siege. Taking a page from psychologist Abraham Maslow, tolerance and understanding, for example, become less of a priority when we are preoccupied with a more primal need: considering how increasingly vulnerable we feel about our relative safety.

In the midst of World War II, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told members of the American Booksellers Association that books must be thought of as "weapons in this war." So too must we wield books as weapons in the reemerging war against intolerance, paranoia, and fear. As the fundamental purveyor and chief advocate for the book, the librarian must be on the front lines.

And you are. Scan the country and on the other side of every challenged book, of every attempt to exclude or limit a threatening idea, is a librarian, determined to preserve our First Amendment rights.

School boards and local politicos continue to try to wrest control of selection policies from librarians. These attempts follow a long tradition of banning or attempting to ban a distinguished list of books considered scurrilous or prurient, including The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. However, I am less troubled by attempts to censor Harry Potter, a commercial phenomenon with sales of 170 million copies in 50 languages, than by other examples of exceptional literature that don't enjoy Potteresque appeal. It is highly doubtful that the challenge of a promising title like Blind Sighted (see "Looking at Language ," pp. 44–45) would elicit the same outcry as Harry Potter.

Amid an uncertain post-9/11 climate, our country is in the throes of a paradoxical struggle: clumsily seeking to secure our communities from terror, while trying to avoid paying the ultimate price by sacrificing our liberties. However, as America girds preemptively for a more secure future, librarians, with their messianic quest to spread knowledge, have an important role to play in restoring our diminishing levels of tolerance, understanding, and forbearance—values that are the hallmarks of a civilized and vibrant democracy.

Evan St. Lifer, Editor estlifer@reedbusiness.com