Illiteracy Über Alles
To: Ms. Suzanne Nossel, CEO
PEN America
588 Broadway
Suite 303
New York, NY 10012
Dear Ms. Nossel:
This should be an easy open letter to you because book burning and banning is foreign to Minnesota, but we’ve just had school board elections. PEN America (which originally stood for poets, essayists, and novelists) fights censorship. You have had a busy year; an unparalleled number of reported book challenges in 2022 nearly doubled the number of challenges reported in the previous year. The number of unique titles targeted marked a 38% increase over 2021. For example, a school district in Florida banned 58 titles in its school system because they destroy “our nation’s founding principles and family values.” The district superintendent proudly stated that he hadn’t read a single paragraph of any of the 58 books he banned.
Finding books opposed to the “nation’s founding principles” has a long, unfortunate history. On May 10, 1933, Nazis gathered in 34 towns to destroy copies of books deemed “un-German”; these included books by Karl Marx, Helen Keller, Ernest Hemingway, Jack London, and Heinrich Heine. One of Heine’s plays includes the famous line “where they burn books, they will also ultimately burn people.” In more recent times, the Harry Potter books have been burned, and the Bible, the Quran, and Talmud have all been burned by various government and private groups in a wide variety of eras and countries.
Children’s books are often banned also: For example, A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein was banned in a school district in Wisconsin because one of the poems contained in the book, “How Not to Have to Dry the Dishes,” might encourage kids to break all their dishes so they wouldn’t have to dry them. Parents in Indiana also expressed concerns that the book promoted “anti-parent material.” Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White is a children’s classic about a pig named Wilbur and his friendship with a spider named Charlotte. A parent group in Kansas sought to ban that book from school libraries because talking animals are “unnatural and blasphemous as humans are the highest level of God’s creation.”
It is literally true that dictionaries will often contain objectionable words, and schools in both Indiana and Alaska have banned The American Heritage Dictionary because it contains some of those words. All of these efforts are the result of dedicated activists trying to impose their own particular (and peculiar) views on other people’s children or on teachers. Unfortunately, as the PEN literacy study establishes, these efforts at dictating ideology or religion to other people have grown in frequency. They are all ridiculous, and we all should know that.
Note the books cited in the previous paragraphs—they are all vastly popular. Charlotte’s Web has sold more than 45 million copies. So the burning or banning of books is usually counterproductive. It wasn’t all that long ago that some books would advertise that they had been “banned in Boston” as a way to boost sales. We are not a society where too many children are reading too many books for too many hours a day. Most teachers and parents would be overjoyed if their children read more books. We have yet to hear a parent say, “If only Johnny would put down his book and spend more time looking at his iPhone!” That, of course, is one of the problems.
Have these book-banning zealots heard of the iPhone? Or the internet? It is just frankly absurd that schools would seriously consider banning books in their library while allowing their students to use mobile phones or other devices that can access the internet. Technology means “the times they are a-changin.’ ” (Watch out, Bob Dylan!)
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Politicians of all stripes can be exercised, if not exorcised (The Exorcist is another banned book) about the issue of book burning and banning. Most recently, both the state of Illinois and the state of California have passed statewide laws prohibiting public schools or public libraries from banning access to books or other material simply because they are attacked by interest groups. The Illinois statute requires adherence to the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights or similar protocol. We do not have a problem of too many students reading too many books; quite the opposite is true.
Book burning and banning seem to ebb and flow with the political winds. Here’s hoping that the impetus to ban books will soon fade, maybe after the 2024 election.
Sincerely yours,
Vance K. Opperman, a lifelong friend of books
