Book Banning and Censorship in High School Education

Introduction: Censorship in American Schools

Social groups — including religious organizations, parents, and school administrators — make decisions daily about what material will become part of the regular school curriculum and what will be excluded. Many decisions are made based on the educational value of textbooks and other learning materials. However, many decisions are unfortunately made without educational potential in mind, and instead rest on what certain people consider profane or proper based on their own sense of moral authority. American schools have long been built on the principle that children must be protected from material deemed inappropriate for them to see, hear, or experience. As the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) has noted, "American schools have been pressured to restrict or deny students access to books or periodicals deemed objectionable by some individual or group on moral, political, religious, ethnic, racial, or philosophical grounds."

Although the strict, ruler-wielding classroom authority figure patrolling student reading from a moral high horse may seem like a relic of the past, recent decades have in fact seen a strong trend toward banning and censoring books and other materials. Teachers who wish to expose students to a wide array of information and literary sources find themselves stifled and restricted, and they expect these difficulties to remain an unfortunate part of the educational struggle as restrictions are placed on classes and libraries. It is essentially impossible for teachers to build curriculum plans free from the risk of challenge, because, as the NCTE observes, "any work is potentially open to attack by someone, somewhere, sometime, for some reason; censorship is often arbitrary and irrational." From the classics — Shakespeare and Melville — to modern publications such as National Geographic magazine, almost anything can be considered offensive or controversial in some context.

A Decade of Book Banning: The 1990s

The 1990s were a particularly active period for book banning and censorship in schools, libraries, and communities, despite all appearances of a more enlightened and diverse era. In 1991, high-profile bannings included McKissack's Mirandy and Brother Wind for its use of Black dialect, and L'Engle's Many Waters for allegedly altering the story of Noah's Ark. In 1992, Sendak's In the Night Kitchen was accused of pornographic content for depicting a bare-bottomed child, and a school board was petitioned to ban the Bible itself for "lewd, indecent, and violent contents" (Dreamweaver). Also in 1992, Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men was challenged for profanity and racial slurs, and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 was hand-censored with permanent markers — a particularly ironic act given the novel's subject matter.

In 1993, Where's Waldo? was banned from many schools and libraries, as was the classic Little House on the Prairie. That same year, Brave New World, the autobiography of Malcolm X, and even the Merriam-Webster's Dictionary were removed from classrooms and libraries. In 1994, Huckleberry Finn was once again under fire for bad grammar and racial slurs; the cover of Poets & Writers magazine was labeled pornographic for featuring a woman in a strapless top; Alice Walker's short stories were banned from statewide exams; and Of Mice and Men faced renewed challenges for offensive language and content. That year also saw Heather Has Two Mommies and the artwork of M.C. Escher declared indecent.

Huck Finn was pulled from yet another school in 1995, and in 1996 both Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House in the Big Woods were banned from schools. In June of that year, Jeff B. Copeland reported that "the 1995–96 academic year saw three hundred censorship challenges to books and movies in public schools. Forty-one percent of these efforts were successful in having the works removed or restricted" (Dreamweaver). During the 1997–98 school year, 55 books were banned by schools in Texas out of 141 formal challenges. Walker was again challenged and removed from school libraries, and R.L. Stine's Goosebumps series was also removed from many schools and libraries. In 1998, the Authors Guild reported that half of the 100 greatest books had been challenged or banned at some point. Shakespeare's Twelfth Night continued to be challenged for allegedly promoting homosexuality, and in 1999, Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear were all removed from school reading lists.

Book Burning as Extreme Censorship

Book banning is an extreme form of censorship, but it does not compare to the tradition of book burning. Book burning has sometimes been conducted on a small scale in a ceremonial fashion to express disapproval of a text's content. In other cases, it has been an attempt to destroy all copies of a particular book in a region, or even entirely. "The practice, often carried out publicly, is usually motivated by moral, political, or religious objections to the material" (Obfusco). Abusive groups have used book burning as a demonstration of power, as in the case of the Nazis in Germany, who burned books in large public displays targeting works that did not support their ideology. In the century before the Nazi regime, Heinrich Heine was quoted as saying, "Where they burn books, they will end in burning human beings" (Heine, in Obfusco). This kind of artistic prophecy is perhaps most powerfully echoed in one of the most commonly banned books of recent years: Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.