Across the United States, from Texas and Tennessee to Washington and Virginia, an ugly era of backlash in educational freedom and fairness is gaining reckless speed.
This has taken form as a wave of book bannings, with record numbers of books on topics including gender, sexuality, and racism being pulled from school libraries amid attacks from parents and conservative politicians. A Tennessee county’s decision to exclude Maus, Art Spiegelman’s 1991 Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from a class syllabus typifies the trend.
Like many high school students in the 1980s, I read The Crucible, an indictment of the Salem Witch trials, written by the playwright Arthur Miller in 1953. It was understood at the time as an allegory against the Communist witch hunts that defined the early years of that decade. The play was banned in Pennsylvania in 1982 and later in Kentucky.
Perhaps the lessons from Miller’s classic have been lost.
While some parents challenge what a child can read, others are censoring classroom instruction. Since January 2021, thirty-seven states have undertaken measures to restrict what can be taught about race and gender in classrooms, according to Education Week.
For centuries, many Americans have idealistically looked to their schools as the great leveler.
For centuries, many Americans have idealistically looked to their schools as the great leveler, a place where possibilities and dreams can take root. In Indiana, where I teach history at the University of Indianapolis, the promise of a free and fair education was enshrined in Article IX of the state’s 1816 constitution.
Although those early Hoosiers were practical in their outlook, they also defined education broadly, as they boldly set forth in their state constitution: “The General Assembly shall . . . pass such laws as shall be calculated to encourage intellectual, Scientifical, and agricultural improvement, by allowing rewards and immunities for the promotion and improvement of arts, sciences, commerce, manufactures, and natural history; and to countenance and encourage the principles of humanity, honesty, industry, and morality.”
Two hundred years later, would-be patriots have used their supermajority in the Indiana state house to pass a bill that would set up parental educational advisory committees designed to prevent the instruction of material deemed offensive. The goal of this legislation is authoritarian censorship, plain and simple.
Some states, including Wisconsin, have a divided government, with a Democratic governor and a Republican-controlled legislature. There, Democratic Governor Tony Evers, a former state schools superintendent, has vetoed efforts to restrict what can be taught in classrooms for now (he is expected to face a steep uphill battle in his reelection bid this fall).
In contrast, in Virginia, Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin’s first act in office was to establish a hotline for parents who believe their children have been introduced to divisive instruction in schools.
This is far from the first time that a fear of the “other” has had deleterious effects on the education establishment.
The 1950s were defined not only by the “Red Scare,” but also by the civil rights movement—and the concerted efforts of many white communities to resist its progress. In response to the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Southern communities established White Citizens’ Councils designed to preserve segregated schools. Soon “segregation academies,” private Christian schools fueled by a nascent effort to provide parents with “school choice,” began to proliferate in many communities; today, a version of these schools still exists in North Carolina and elsewhere.
Civil rights history too often paints the struggle as primarily taking place in former Confederate states. The lessons of the reaction to the desegregation of busing in Boston during the 1970s demonstrates such a conceit was an easy way for white Americans in the “free” North to avoid confronting profound inequalities which persist across the country.
Civil rights history too often paints the struggle as primarily taking place in former Confederate states.
The fear of losing local control is the common thread that unites white parents from 1950s Mississippi to 1970s Boston and the states considering restrictive legislation in the present. In each of these examples, worlds that parents had taken for granted were threatened.
Just as it was far easier to blame “outside agitators” during the 1950s, so too is it easier for a handful of parents in 2022 to target Toni Morrison’s Beloved as the locus of their woes.
Today’s proponents of parental empowerment somehow believe that by banning the instruction of offensive material, they can prevent students from learning about different races, ethnicities, and cultures.
The country needs more courageous governors like Wisconsin’s Tony Evers. It also needs state representatives like Indiana’s Wendy McNamara, a Republican who went against her party to oppose the troublesome bill in her state. But that is not enough.
To be sure, teachers’ unions, concerned parents, and others worried about the reactionary power of statehouses throughout the country have begun to mobilize. They need to do more.
The message to policy makers and elected officials needs to be to treat teachers as professionals. And, rather than a single group dictating what’s best for students, allow all stakeholders—including educators, experts, parents, and others—to decide which books are in libraries and what classes are taught in schools.