Here’s what should change if South Carolina insists on banning books in public schools | Opinion
Christian Hanley and Jamie Gregory both have South Carolinians’ best interests at heart. They just have different ways to ensure our well-being and different definitions of well-being.
Hanley is chair of the state Department of Education’s Instructional Materials Review Committee. It decides which challenged books to retain or remove from K-12 public schools for inappropriate sexual content. Jamie Gregory is president of the South Carolina Association of School Librarians. Its partnership with the state was completely severed a year ago by the state superintendent of education because of a disagreement over appropriate materials.
I love books and I love my daughters and I love exploring complex issues, so I called Hanley and Gregory to talk to them about all this. I’m glad I did. More people should hear other people out. It’s how we make things better.
Hanley is a Berkeley County family doctor and a youth minister who previously spent nearly 29 years in the U.S. Air Force. Gregory is a teacher turned South Carolina school librarian of the year at an Episcopal school in Greenville. They have each devoted decades to public service.
Gregory believes school librarians have the training and discernment to choose books for their communities and to work with anyone worried about any particular book at the local level. She is opposed to the banning of books, which she knows firsthand help students navigate difficulty.
Hanley believes parents and their emissaries at the state should decide what’s appropriate for kids. He doesn’t consider what state officials do to be book banning but rather setting rules for curation because books are available in public libraries, in bookstores and for purchase online.
I called them last week to discuss what’s best for South Carolina after a second state Board of Education meeting in four weeks to consider removing books that have adorned public school shelves for decades. After banning seven books, keeping three others and delaying a decision on “Crank” by Ellen Hopkins on Nov. 5, the board voted last week to retain “Crank,” as I had argued in an earlier column, but to limit access to high schoolers with parental consent. It postponed votes on “Bronx Masquerade” by Nikki Grimes and “The House on Mango Street” by Sandra Cisneros and asked for more information about the challenges from the complainant.
I’ve been opposed to book bans since I first read Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” as a kid. But I’m also the father of two teenage girls I want to protect as much and as long as I can. I believe books provide them safe spaces to learn about the trickiest parts of life. But I recognize my family’s values aren’t the same as other families’. Nor should they be. We all see the world differently.
That’s the trickiest part of being a person who decides which kids should read which books.
And it’s why empowering state officials to remove books with descriptions of sexual conduct from public schools was never going to satisfy everyone. The policy took automatic effect this year after the General Assembly didn’t discuss or vote on it 120 days after being shown it. That was a dereliction of duty on an issue of importance to South Carolinians. But it can and should be revisited with new legislation this year because the process clearly can be improved.
If the policy must stay, Gregory sees lots of room for improvement. She emailed her group’s school librarians last week with ideas to support them, ensure equitable access to information, uphold intellectual freedom rights and respect parental involvement. Yet Hanley thinks it’s premature to change anything yet. He said he has received hundreds of emails from people who support the Board of Education’s book removals as well as requests to change the policy.
He tells them to contact their lawmakers, and I’d recommend the same thing.
As it stands, the policy allows any parent of public school age-children to petition the state to ban up to five books a month — 60 a year — from public schools. First, those parents need to raise their concerns with local school librarians, administrators and school board members. Then parents can complain to Hanley’s committee. It makes recommendations to the full board, which has final say on which books to retain or remove from all South Carolina public schools.
Here’s how I think the policy could be improved after long, thoughtful and constructive conversations with Hanley and Gregory.
There is no requirement for board members who might ban books to read them. They should. The policy also doesn’t incorporate state obscenity laws that weigh the literary, artistic or scientific value of the whole book against any passage in it. It should. Context matters. Also, decisions shouldn’t be limited to board members. Parents, teachers, administrators, librarians and students should be involved as well.
Here’s how the policy can work better now.
Books deemed inappropriate for younger students can be kept in high school, as “Crank” was, with or without parental consent. Requiring consent can be problematic for students who don’t or won’t talk to parents about topics from drugs to sex. But it’s better than entirely removing a book that could help a teenager, and it does encourage family discussions, which are healthy.
Here’s one aspect to monitor going forward: How many books get banned?
It’s a lot to give one parent the power to challenge and potentially remove five dozen books over a dozen months when there are 800,000 public school students being raised by well over 1 million other parents in South Carolina. What about their rights and intellectual freedom?
This is all a balancing act in a society with so many conflicting viewpoints, but evaluating and improving the book review policy is essential since state leaders have chosen to have one. If you think this is only about books, you haven’t read enough of them. You could start with “1984,” which the committee considered banning last month but voted unanimously to retain. As George Orwell wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”