Censorship: Good News

From The Guardian: US conservative parents push for book bans – and unintentionally make reading cool again.

In case you fo not know ehat had been going on in Texas and Virginia and Pennsylvania:

As always, the impetus of the mania is simple, stupid and cynical. The Republican party has made a concerted effort to bring outré philosophic principles like critical race theory to the heart of our politics, which is why the Virginia governor-elect, Glenn Youngkin, spent much of his time on the campaign trail griping about Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Parents took the bait, and overnight high school librarians – those brazen extremists pushing their anti-American agendas by cataloging Pulitzer winners from 1987 – were put in the crosshairs.

And the effect has been:

 At the very least, hopefully the censorship campaigns encourage kids to read more. I like the idea of enterprising teens wielding the Krause agenda like a summer reading list, checking off every title, one by one, until they’ve firmly opened their third eye.

One of the most heartening stories that surfaced from the hysteria occurred in York county, Pennsylvania, where local ordinances forbade teachers from using a swath of texts in their lesson plans last November. (The taxonomy was bizarre. Biographies of Aretha Franklin, Malala Yousafazi and Eleanor Roosevelt were put on ice.) High schoolers around the community roused to action – staging campus protests, canvassing the local papers and eventually winning a reversal of the policy in September.

Nothing like free publicity. Nothing like a ban to excite curiosity. My hopes are raised.

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12/23/21