Mat-Su school board members didn't bother to read classic books they banned
On the day that some Alaskans drove in cars and trucks on Anchorage streets and honked their horns to complain about businesses being closed during a global health pandemic, an Alaska school board voted 5-2 to ban one the world's great newspapers as a teacher's resource and remove five important works of literature from an upper-level elective class.
This action Wednesday by the rulers of the Mat-Su school district is already a statewide embarrassment. It will be a national embarrassment.
If you want to hear the discussion about banning books that most of the board had not read, it starts at the 1:12 mark of this recording.
The offending newspaper is the New York Times, which can no longer be used as a resource for teachers in English classes. The board members don’t like the New York Times Learning Network, a project dedicated to “using the news of the day to create a safe and welcoming space to develop critical-thinking skills.”
The offending books are, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” “The Great Gatsby,” “Catch-22,” “Invisible Man,” and “The Things They Carried.”
The first four are among the most significant works of the 20th Century, while the fifth is one of the best accounts of the Vietnam war.
Most of the school board members appeared to know nothing about the books except for what was included on this one-page summary of “Controversial Book Descriptions.”
The books have language and ideas that some people find upsetting.
What is missing from the page of denunciations and from the consciousness of the five school board members is an understanding that every good book is controversial, including the Bible.
“Is there a reason that we include books that we even label as controversial in our curriculum?” asked Jeff Taylor, who ran for office pledging “out of the box” thinking. “I would prefer that these were gone.”
Board member Jim Hart, who is a federal employee, said he had read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s "The Great Gatsby" as a teenager, but he couldn’t remember anything about it. He said that “Catch-22” had been made into a movie long ago. He said he “didn’t know anything” about “The Things They Carried.”
“Those three books are probably PG-13," Hart said, making reference to the movie rating system that has nothing to do with books.
He said he hadn’t read "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings," and "Invisible Man," but he looked at the SparkNotes study guides. No competent teacher, student of literature or school board member would make a judgement about a book without reading it.
He said the cheat sheet he consulted mentions that Chapter 11 of “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” deals with molestation in graphic language.
If he were to read that out loud in an office he would be “dragged to the equal opportunity office.” He said “Invisible Man” mentions incest and contains sordid stories.
"When you have books that you could not read publicly without going to EO, that's probably a pretty good litmus test," of what is not appropriate, according to Hart. He said the contents of the controversial books he hasn’t read are “beyond the pale for just about any audience.”
I suggest that Hart, amateur literary critic, should walk into a random office and start reading a book out loud to see what happens. It’s either the best way to decide if something is appropriate or a guarantee that you will be escorted off the premises by security.
“We’re not talking about something that’s mind expanding or something that’s going to help anybody learn any better,” Hart said of the books he hadn’t read.
All of these books are appropriate for a high school elective course. They are used throughout the United States and elsewhere in Alaska.
If the school board members did more reading, they would discover that books often make people uncomfortable and are a vital tool in learning how to think.
When I first heard about this action, I immediately thought of the words of Mark Twain: “In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then he made school boards.”
That’s not fair to school board members. I’ve known a lot of good ones who took on the thankless task and went to endless meetings to try to improve education. But the Mat-Su board members did nothing to disprove Twain’s wisecrack with this idiotic decision.
They offered no coherent reason for banning these books other than they didn’t like what they had heard about them or seen on the handy denunciation page. At the very least they should have had the good sense to lie to the public and claim that they had read the books before banning them.
Some of the board members appeared to be unaware that the books were for an elective course and that state law allows any parent to withdraw a child from a class if the parent objects to the material being taught.
Well sure that’s the state law, but it’ not enough to protect kids if the parents don’t pay attention, according to board member Ole Larson, a retired state employee.
“I can tell you the majority of the parents will just sign off on the books and won’t read them anyway, or won’t even know what’s in them,” said Larson.
Larson, another critic who hasn’t read the material, said “the segments in the books that I just heard” from Hart made him conclude that the books don’t belong in the classroom.
Larson said he doesn’t want to “burn books,” he wants the “great literatures, as we had” back in the old days.
“In those great literatures, there are controversial issues, but not specific sexual in nature type issues,” said Larson.
I listened to the entire discussion about “great literatures” and it was not entirely worthless.
The most astute observations came from board member Sarah Welton, who cast one of the two dissenting votes. The other was from Kelsey Trimmer.
Welton said that parents could talk about the issues in controversial books with their kids and that she wants her grandchildren to be introduced to all kinds of literature.
“I think you're putting your head in the sand, that's just my opinion. If you really truly believe that you are protecting your children, you can protect them by just saying don’t take that class and don’t be involved in the New York Times,” said Welton.