Like high school classrooms, I have seen how the atmosphere in college and university classrooms is tainted by the effects of this culture war. As a tenured college teacher, I acknowledge that my ability to choose banned or targeted texts is much greater than that of my K-12 colleagues. I no longer receive parental objections or restrictions about content, from school administration.
Moreover, this feels like a new war. Increasingly, books with themes about race, gender identity, and sexuality have been banned. Aa third of all the books that are currently being removed from classrooms and libraries address LGBTQ issues, while a fifth directly address race and racism. While I won't defend or second guess the disconcerting allegations swirling around some of these writers, I will defend the right and perhaps the necessity to separate the author from the text, the artist from the work, and the composer from the music. Canceling them not only punishes the offending author, but it punishes our students by depriving them of valuable reading experiences that are nearly impossible to replicate.
These are particularly troubling times for educators. Myself and my fellow teachers find ourselves in a bitterly divided country with ideological discourse reaching a feverish peak. My belief is that to find our way past these perils, our classrooms need to remain spaces where critical thinking is taught, tolerance for different viewpoints is modeled, and the sometimes-harsh truths of our history and literary heritage are openly acknowledged.
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