Literature Under Fire Around the Country

High school reading selections and the teachers who assign them are under fire in Texas, suburban New York, and West Virginia. Local booksellers, bestselling authors, as well as parents and school administrators, have become involved in controversies in which advocates of free speech and intellectual openness are battling charges of child endangerment and promoting pornography.

In the small village of Westhampton Beach on New York's Long Island, Terry Lucas, a parent and owner of The Open Book, has brought community-wide attention to an effort by some local high school parents to ban two popular books from a non-required, "self-select" list of approximately 300 books for ninth graders.

According to Lucas, the books are The Tenth Circle by Jodi Picoult and Cradle & All by James Patterson. "Some parents became concerned about the sexual content of the books," she told BTW, "and copied selections from the books and circulated a petition asking the school board to remove those books from the list." The school board has instituted a required review process and a committee is meeting to review the books.

Lucas objected publicly to banning either book at the last school board meeting, and plans to speak again on the subject at this week's meeting. She has also organized an event at her store this Saturday to "Celebrate the Right to Read." The event will include local residents, parents, and students; author Roger Rosenblatt (Lapham Rising) and others will read selections from the 100 most banned books of 1990 to 2000; Lucas will read aloud a supportive letter from author Jodi Picoult.

"We will have an area in the store where participants may write letters to the school board or make a poster," Lucas continued. "I am hoping that this will show how a group can protest a proposed action in a civil and creative way."

Lucas explained that as the owner of the local bookstore and a parent of two children in the school system, she felt that she had to speak out about this issue. "I do not think that any parent has the right to choose what someone else's children may or may not read," she emphasized to BTW. "The self-select reading list is extensive and no student is required to read a particular book on the list. A parent may review the list with his teen and discuss what books are acceptable in their family."

The repercussions, she noted, of removing any books from the reading list, could be detrimental. "If these two books are removed, the school board will be met with more challenges based on conflicting values and moral codes."

Chris Finan, president of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression and author of a new book about the fight for free speech in America (From the Palmer Raids to the Patriot Act, Beacon) agreed with Lucas. "Any attempts to ban books or remove titles from reading lists and school libraries have a chilling effect on the right to free speech," he told BTW. "School boards and principals often shift to panic mode [when parents object to books], and immediately pull the book. In [Westhampton Beach], the school system has provisions in place to deal with this situation, so the sole responsibility doesn't fall to the principal or the school board."

In Kanawha County, West Virginia, author Pat Conroy responded to an attempt instigated by three parents of Nitro High School students to have two of his books banned from the school by sending a scathing letter to the local newspaper, the Charleston Gazette. The parents protested formally to the school board that two books, Beach Music and The Prince of Tides, not be considered appropriate for students in Advanced Placement literature classes in the school.

Declaring "book banners are invariably idiots," Conroy lashed out at those who would remove the books from the AP curriculum. "[The Kanawha School Board has] entered the ranks of censors, book-banners, and teacher-haters, and the word will spread," he wrote.

Conroy was responding to a personal appeal from George Washington High School senior Makenzie Hatfield, who helped form a coalition against censorship with neighboring Nitro High students.

In a more temperate tone, the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) and ABFFE sent a letter to the Kanawha County Board of Education urging the board not to ban these books. They wrote: "Indeed, if students were precluded from reading literature with sexual content, they would be deprived of exposure to vast amounts of important material, including Shakespeare, major religious texts such as the Bible, the works of Tolstoy, Flaubert, Joyce, Faulkner, D.H. Lawrence, and Nabokov, and contemporary books such as I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and many of the texts regularly assigned in high schools throughout the State of West Virginia."

The ABFFE and NCAC letter also noted that, "confronting difficult themes in literature like those presented in The Prince of Tides and Beach Music is part of the educational mission of the AP program. The school district would potentially put its students at an educational disadvantage if it did not introduce them to challenging literature of this sort in high school."

The Kanawha school board initially removed the two titles from the Honors English and AP classes, but after reading Beach Music, a majority of a 14-member committee comprising community residents and professionals voted to retain Beach Music. The same committee is currently reading The Prince of Tides.

Some school board members are requesting set guidelines for selecting classroom materials; some want teachers to read all books in their entirety before assigning them; and some want to institute a rating system, similar to the movie rating system.

ABFFE Program Director Rebecca Zeidel told BTW that rating systems or advisory labels for books are fraught with pitfalls. "Ratings would be a crude tool for distinguishing books," she said. "Anything rated 'R' would be a warning flag for administrators, even if the rating were assigned for a few words or pages." And deciding who would rate the books and on what criteria could impose a particular viewpoint, or generate more book challenges, she added.

"The best way to handle books that some find objectionable," Zeidel said, "is for parents or students to request an alternative assignment."

In Tuscola, Texas, population 715, a ninth grader's choice of Cormac McCarthy's Child of God, one of scores of books available for the advanced English student at the Jim Ned High School, has created a firestorm. According to newspaper accounts, the 24-year-old teacher and football coach, Kaleb Tierce, who teaches the class, had not read the book, but had read many others by McCarthy, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Tierce has been placed on paid leave after the parents of the 14-year-old girl read sections of Child of God. The book, based on a historical incident, includes graphic depictions of violence, including rape and necrophilia.

The girl's family, after protesting to school officials, filed a complaint against Tierce with the Taylor County Sheriff's Office to determine if the teacher broke Texas law by "distributing harmful material to minors."

The book, which was taken from Tierce's classroom collection, is on the Jim Ned High School's list of approved reading materials for pre-AP ninth grade English students. Abilene's Reporter-News published the lists of approved books for each high school grade level obtained through a Freedom of Information request.

The order for Child of God at the public library has been cancelled, and Tuscola has no local bookstore where the book can be purchased. The controversy has polarized the community. Many students want Tierce back to teach and to coach football; both Tierce and school administrators are not commenting publicly due to an ongoing criminal investigation.

Finan told BTW that often freedom of speech and banned books are considered abstractions. But, he said, "There are really flesh and blood people whose careers, peace of mind, and professional responsibilities are threatened. These cases are particularly consequential."

As in the Tuscola case, "protestors escalate when they fail to win," Finan noted. "In Howell, Michigan, protestors were not satisfied because they failed to get the school board to act, so they tried to get the police to arrest teachers -- they went to the U.S. attorney, and wanted to involve the FBI. This all has a chilling effect. This is not a healthy situation for free speech."

From The Open Book in Westhampton Beach, Lucas told BTW, "As a bookseller, the written word is both my bread and butter, and my passion. I want to encourage people of all ages and interests to learn to love reading as much as I do. Offering the high school students a wide selection of books may bring this to pass.

To learn more, visit the new (and expanding) ABFFE web page on school book controversies. --Nomi Schwartz