Inquiry II Seminar

Selection and Censorship in the School Bookroom:

A Critical Inquiry Into the Influences on Literature Taught in High School Classes

 

“A word after a word after a word is power”

– Margaret Atwood

Context

In the long-lost days of labouriously hand-written manuscripts, books took a long time to make. Before printing was mechanized, scribes were commissioned to duplicate existing texts, and only those with the social clout and financial means to acquire these one- or two-of-a-kind books could order their creation. The long chains of letters and words held in these volumes, the “power” that Atwood points to, was the domain of the highest classes alone – they were the only ones who could afford the books, and the only ones who could read them.

Those days are gone. The advent of moveable type and, more recently, technological advances that have enabled publishers to digitally lay out type and print on massive offset printers have streamlined the mass production of books. Today, cheap paperbacks are ubiquitous, and the written word is a prominent fixture in most people’s lives.

For the most part, it sounds great. Books, accessible in libraries, bookstores, and online, can be read, shared, translated, reviewed, and annotated by people all over the world. Wherever you are, you can use books as tools in the pursuit of self-edification and empowerment. After all, there are endless ideas to be found in books. Given the opportunity to browse well-stocked shelves, most any reader could likely find something that interested them.

But if the ideas propagated in books are so wonderfully diverse that every reader can find something that suits them, they may also find something that offends them. Naturally, not everyone agrees on what ideas are worth reading about. This sort of readerly cognitive dissonance dates back to the earliest civilizations we know of, and has, on occasion, caused serious damage. For example, the irreplaceable holdings at the Library at Alexandria were burned several times, and historians still don’t know for certain who was responsible (Baez 43). Today, reactions to unpalatable reading material vary; the most extreme is still to call for the offending book to be banned or even destroyed. Most readers don’t have much experience with book bonfires, and rather know books as sources of information, adventure, and enjoyment.

One of the first places many readers remember encountering a book is in a classroom. In Canadian public high schools today, many teachers are able to select the books they teach. This may not sound like a contentious issue; however, by teaching students about a book, by reading it with them and asking them to think about it, write about it, draw about it, or act it out, teachers imply that that book has value. Designating a text “worth studying” grants it influence in addition to the power that Canadian author and wellspring of literary opinion, Margaret Atwood, has noted is carried in its words. When a teacher assigns a text, it tells students that the people, ideas, places, and worldviews contained within are somehow worth more than the contents of other texts that aren’t being studied.

Because the books we teach about are endowed with some additional worth simply by being used by educators, the process of selection suddenly saddles teachers with great responsibility. It is prudent, then, to consider the roots of book selection in the classroom, so that we – as teachers – can be more aware of the forces at work within and upon every text we encounter. Considering the dusty, well-established canon of a few dozen books that populates many high school bookrooms, an additional question arises: what causes the privileging of a tiny percentage of texts over others, and what are the effects? This is the point of inquiry that has guided the research that follows.

 

Key Findings:

A review of current research into selection issues reveals that there are myriad factors that bring a book into a high school classroom or, alternatively, keep a book out. These factors range from innocuous, administrative ones, like the availability of funding to purchase new books, to the much more malevolent, like overlooking or intentionally ignoring books based on beliefs about their content. Availability issues take much of the responsibility for book selection out of the teacher’s hands. For the purposes of this inquiry, we can set aside those instances that are purely a result of having only one or two options of novels available. When a teacher’s reason for selecting a text is not an innocent issue of accessibility, however, it’s sometimes the result of a much more nefarious influence: the attempt to stifle certain voices or ideas through censorship.

Now that the “c” word is out there, perhaps we should spend a moment considering one explanation of the difference between the terms “censorship” and “selection.” After all, most teachers wouldn’t classify themselves as censors when they choose, or “select,” a book to read with their students. In what is now considered a classic in writings on this issue, theorist Lester Asheim, distinguishes between these terms. In his 1953 paper, “Not Censorship But Selection,” Asheim notes that the difference between the censor and selector is not so much in the standards they employ, but in the way they employ them. He writes, “the selector’s approach is positive, while that of the censor is negative.” Asheim continues:

…to the selector, the important thing is to find reasons to keep the book. Given such a guiding principle, the selector looks for values, for strengths, for virtues which will overshadow minor objections. For the censor, on the other hand, the important thing is to find reasons to reject the book; his guiding principle leads him to seek out the objectionable features, the weaknesses, the possibilities for misinterpretation. (66)

Asheim’s argument can be boiled down to this: both selectors and censors are making value judgements about books, but “the selector begins, ideally, with a presumption in favour of liberty of thought; the censor does not…selection is democratic while censorship is authoritarian” (67). A librarian’s task, for example, is what Asheim would call “selecting” books, not “censoring” them, because a librarian “seeks to protect the right of the reader to read” and attempts to provide them with books that will empower them as readers (67).

To diverge slightly from the good-versus-evil binary that Asheim sets out in his work, based on my research I define censorship and selection as two points on a spectrum of literary control, with neither located in the “democratic” realm. Both selection and censorship involve a decision made by one individual on the behalf of another as to what information will be available to them. Canadian theorists Shariff and Johnny have concluded, much as I have, that “censorship is not only about what is banned from our schools but also…what information is presented” (2, emphasis in original). While the act of book selection may have more altruistic roots than the act of denunciation, it is by no means democratic.

Now that we have an idea of the semantics of book censorship we should consider: what causes it? What could those pages contain that is so offensive, so reprehensible, that it must not be seen? According to research done by Henry Reichman, the most common causes of book banning or challenges to literature are: works that are considered “subversive,” contain “politically or socially unorthodox ideas,” are “explicitly sexual,” or “advocate radical change” (18). Additionally, groups “struggling against long-established stereotypes” often attempt to censor materials based on a desire “to reject materials that challenge their cause” (18).

With these reasons in mind, at this point, it is useful to step back for a moment and consider all the forces that act on a text before it is anywhere near a teacher or a school bookroom. By the time a book goes to press, censorship has already had a major effect on the finished product. Decisions about what to include and what to omit begin with the writer of the text. For example, in Censorship in Canadian Literature, author Mark Cohen describes what he found when reviewing drafts of Timothy Findley’s novel, The Wars. In the earlier drafts, Cohen found “more explicit profane language than appears in the published version” (25). Cohen, despite Findley’s disagreement, asserts that this is an example of self-censorship.

In the publishing process for the same novel, Timothy Findley fought (against his editor, John Pearce, as well as Canadian author and free speech advocate, Margaret Laurence) to keep a scene in the book that has since resulted in The Wars being challenged in some Canadian high schools (Canada Council). Cohen writes, “Findley resisted one attempt at pre-publication censorship that involved a scene in the novel in which the hero, Robert Ross, is raped by fellow soldiers” (24).

Findley’s publication history provides an example one more type of pre-publication censorship: delayed publishing. “He decided to delay the publication of Famous Last Words in Britain and France after being ‘strongly advised’ (Inside Memory, 204) that he could be sued for libel by the Duchess of Windsor” (Cohen 24). Considering only the work of one author and only the forces acting on that author’s work prior to publication, three distinct types of censorship can be identified.

In considering the power of authors and editors to limit what books the public has access to, we must also note the publishing houses themselves. The decision about what texts are chosen for publication and when they are published are two more factors in selection. Once ink is on paper, two more variables – where those books are distributed and in what numbers – must be added to the equation to find the sum total of the democracy of our bookshelves. Although the American Library Association prescribes in its “Freedom to Read” document that publishers should “make available the widest diversity of views and expressions, including those that are unorthodox, unpopular, or considered dangerous by the majority,” (Connelly 84) most publishing houses are still attempting to make money. If they have any business sense at all, they’ll be unlikely to take on manuscripts that might be censored off of bookstore shelves.

What book publishers want from a manuscript is a sure bet: a book that will sell in large numbers and perhaps even warrant a reprint – a rarity in the Canadian book industry. They want a novel that will get attention, earn glowing reviews, and perhaps even crop up on a few “best books” lists somewhere. Thus, a discussion of censorship and selection in the publishing industry leads, somewhat paradoxically but quite necessarily, to the issue of literary prizing and canonization. These two related forces create literary classics and assign, much like the selection of books by teachers, additional value to a book.

The same process of valuation that students feel when their teacher selects a book is at play when a text is awarded a literary prize or when Oprah or Heather (of Chapters/Indigo fame) picks it for her book club. Who are these women, really, and why do we care what they think? Either millions of readers know more about these ladies’ literary expertise than I do or they don’t care about the specifics. A sticker on the cover of a book is proof enough of the text’s literary worth: in some cases, being selected for O’s Book Club has causes publishers to “increase a print run fivefold” (Pickert).

This is not meant to slight either Oprah or Heather; many readers really enjoy the books they recommend. The point is that Oprah’s or Heather’s sticker is a fairly arbitrary mark of a book’s value, just as the sticker on the cover of a book that has won a Giller or a Booker is an arbitrary valuation of the text. Whether Oprah’s seal of approval or the Orange Prize is adhered to the book, trumpeting its worth, it merely represents another person’s (or a group of people’s) opinion of the text. The criteria used to judge the book are relatively unknown. All book prizing is an inherently arbitrary process. This is extremely problematic given the role that prizing plays in canonization of a text, and the influence that both these markers of literary worth have on what we teach in schools.

Indeed, there is a palpable circularity to this system of prizing, canonization, and what books we teach students about. As Kenneth Kidd has noted in his research, “prizing and censorship aren’t so much opposite activities as related and even complementary mechanisms” both are processes of evaluation (197-98). In many cases, the books that are most likely to get into the school bookroom in the first place are those works of literature that are “classics” or “award-winners.” Those books then get taught and re-taught. There are many lists available of “prize-winners for schools” and entire books devoted to cataloguing award-winning novels[1]. These books have been legitimized by their awards and their prior use in classrooms, and so continue to be taught again and again.

Once a book is selected for use in school, it also becomes part of the canon of books taught in school. In a survey done in 1992, Arthur Applebee asked high school teachers across the United States what books were most frequently taught in their schools. The results of his study showed that precisely the same books were taught in public and Catholic schools. In independent schools, there was only one difference – The Odyssey was in the top ten whereas in public and Catholic schools, students read Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. The other nine books taught most frequently at schools in the USA were: “Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Huckleberry Finn, Julius Caesar, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Scarlet Letter, Of Mice and Men, Hamlet, The Great Gatsby,” and William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” (Applebee).

Of the books named by Applebee’s study participants, one has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize (To Kill a Mockingbird), and two are by Nobel Prize-winning authors (John Steinbeck and William Golding). This is not to say that the prizes and awards these books have garnered make them immune to challenge – to be sure, attempts to censor books on this list have been made – but their legitimacy is much harder to question with all these distracting, shiny awards in the mix.

To return to Canada and Timothy Findley’s The Wars, a book that has been challenged numerous times by concerned parents in this country for its inclusion of violent sexual content: the phrase that follows the title of the book in several newspaper articles dismissing the attempt at banning as nonsense is “Governor-General Award-winning novel” (Urback). The fact that it has won a literary award is reason enough, to those who advocate the novel’s use in schools, to keep it on the shelves.  The issue of canonization of Canadian novels, as Robert Lecker has pointed out, is still a work in progress. The newness of the Canadian “canon” provides a fascinating opportunity to observe how a country’s literature is selected and shaped, but is unfortunately beyond the scope of this particular investigation[2].

When speaking of selection of materials for school use, there is one more canon worth mentioning: the canon of banned and challenged books. Ironically, the efforts of parents, school boards, and other organizations to remove certain books from schools have resulted in these books attaining almost a cult status. “Despite differences in aim and attitude, prizing and censorship frequently achieve the same end result of greater publicity and symbolic capital” (199). The popularity of “Banned Books Week” in the United States is a good example of this: in 2013, the celebration of censored literature will have its thirty-year anniversary. In Canada, an organization called Freedom to Read champions the rights of readers to select their own books.

As we have seen, there are many factors at work before the books even reach school bookrooms and at least part of the reification of the high school canon is due to, as I’ve noted, the limitations of what is available in the school bookroom. If there are sixty, dog-eared copies of Lord of the Flies and no money to purchase a class set of anything else, then Lord of the Flies is what students will read. Given these limitations, should we worry so much about what books we share? After all, students aren’t in school all day. They can read other books if they like. They can watch movies and television shows, play video games, and visit the theatre. These actions could allow them to experience any number of stories outside the ones they encounter in our English classrooms. However, as I have noted, these out-of-school works differ in one fundamental way from in-class texts: they are not privileged as “worth studying.” Only the texts we bring into our classrooms can be labeled with that distinction. Lord of the Flies is a brilliant book, by my estimation, but it may not resonate with students in the same way.

The impact of implicitly or explicitly labeling a book as “teachable” or “worth learning about” extends far beyond the students in the classroom. We can likely all remember at least one book we studied in school; we may find that there is a great deal of overlap between what one student read in her high school English classes and what another did. In this way, the books we teach become reified in their minds of students as “books that were taught in my high school.” If those students become teachers or parents, they may be likely to teach or recommend the books to young people.

The reality for most high school teachers is that even if they wanted to, it wouldn’t be possible to allow students to choose their own books for study. Teachers are limited by funding constraints and by what feels like a constantly dwindling number of hours in each day. Teaching a text (responsibly, anyways) requires that the teacher takes the time to study that text before bringing it to their students. It takes much more effort not to “teach what you know,” which may be another reason (besides what’s in the bookroom) why the same “classics” are taught again and again. That’s not to say that all classic texts should be dispensed with, but rather that it’s good to throw in a few literary curve balls when planning lessons.

Privileging literature of one style, genre, or originating country might not be a problem if all people experienced things in precisely the same way. Fortunately, this is not the case: we’re far from homogeneity, particularly in a nation as culturally diverse as Canada. It has been written by Canadian scholars on classroom book selection that choosing inappropriate texts can result “in the marginalization of many students” (Shariff 3), most likely those who don’t see their lives, beliefs, and realities represented in the studied texts. These books are not only irrelevant to these students, but position them with startling consistently, as an “other,” not part of the mainstream. Therefore, it is crucial that we are thoughtful about which texts we teach, and give students the chance to have a say in what they read.

 

Works Cited

Applebee, A. “Book-length Works Taught in High School English Courses.” ERIC Digest. 1990. Web. <http://www.ericdigests.org/pre-9214/book.htm>

Asheim, Lester. “Not Censorship but Selection.” Wilson Library Bulletin 28. (1953): 63-67.

Atwood, Margaret. “Spelling.” PoemHunter.com. n.d. Web. 15 Jan. 2013. <http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/spelling/>

Baez, Fernando. A Universal History of the Destruction of Books. New York: Atlas, 2008.

Canada Council for the Arts. Challenged Books and Magazines List, February 2012. 2009. PDF. 5 Jan. 2013. <http://www.freedomtoread.ca/docs/challenged_books_and_magazines_february_2012.pdf>

Cohen, M. Censorship in Canadian Literature. Montreal: McGill-Queens UP, 2001.

Connelly, Deborah S., “To Read or Not To Read: Understanding Book Censorship.” Community and Junior College Libraries 2009: 83-90.

Kidd, Kenneth. “’Not Censorship but Selection’: Censorship and/as Prizing.” Children’s Literature in Education 40 (2009): 197-216.

Lecker, Robert. “The Canonization of Canadian Literature: An Inquiry into Value.” Critical Inquiry 16.3 (1990): 656-71.

Pickert, Kate. “Oprah’s Book Club.” TIME. 26 Sept. 2008. Web. 16 Jan. 2013. <http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1844724,00.html>

Reichman, Henry. Censorship and Selection: Issues and Answers for Schools. Chicago: American Library Association, 2001.

Shariff, S. & L. Johhny. Censorship!…Or…Selection?: Confronting a Curriculum of Orthodoxy Through Pluraistic Models. Rotterdam: Sense, 2007.

Smith, Laura. Children’s Book Awards International: A Directory of Awards and Winners, from Inception through 1990. Jefferson: McFarland & Co., 1992.

Urback, Robyn. “Don’t Ban The Wars.” Maclean’s. 24 May 2011. Web. 15 Jan. 2013. <http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2011/05/24/don%E2%80%99t-ban-the-wars/>

 

Works Consulted

“20 Books to Read While in High School.” Ottawa Sun. 16 Sept. 2012. Web. 12 Jan. 2013 <http://www.ottawasun.com/2012/09/16/20-books-to-read-while-in-high-school>

Applebee, A. “Stability and Change in the High School Canon.” English Journal 81.5 (1992). 27-32.

—. “The 43 Books Most Frequently Taught in 5% or More of Public Schools, Grades 7-12.” Compiled by Northport School District. n.d. Web. 13 Jan. 2013. <http://northport.k12.ny.us/~nphs/english%20college.htm>

Associated Press. “Best Books Listed for High School Students.” The New York Times 11 Aug. 1984. Web.

“Banned & Challenged Books.” American Library Association. Web. 7 Jan. 2013. <http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned>

“Bannings and Burnings in History.” Freedom to Read. Canada Council for the Arts. 2009. Web. 5 Jan. 2013.

“BC Books for BC Schools: Selected and Evaluated by Teacher Librarians, 2010 – 2011.” Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia. PDF. 2011. < http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=3&cad=rja&ved=0CEUQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fbooks.bc.ca%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2009%2F05%2FABPBC-2010-Catalogue-BC-Books-WEB.pdf&ei=QezyUOeIM-H6igLCtoDABw&usg=AFQjCNHf2KSF0TdMBa-8LTAsmVHcqFG7Mg&sig2=pNCRjekA4at87kEmqRY5mA&bvm=bv.1357700187,d.cGE

British Columbia Library Association Intellectual Freedom Committee. “Censorship in British Columbia: A History.” Web. 6 Jan. 2013. <http://www.bcla.bc.ca/ifc/Censorship%20BC/intro.html>

Brittain, Amy. “High School Reading Lists Get a Modern Makeover.” Christian Science Monitor. Aug. 2011.

Clydesdale, Jacqui. “Book’Em [Book Censorship].” This 2002: 2-3. CBCA Complete. Web. 7 Jan. 2013. <http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/docview/203549510>

Finklestein, David, and Alistair McCleery. An Introduction to Book History. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Kreider, Tim. “Uncle Ray’s Dystopia.” The New York Times 8 June 2012. Web. <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/08/opinion/uncle-rays-dystopia.html

Pally, Marcia. Sense and Censorship: The Vanity of Bonfires. New York: Americans for Constitutional Freedom, 1991.

Reimer, Constance, and Marcia Brock. “Books, Students, Censorship: Reality in the Classroom.” The English Journal 77.7 (1988): 69-71. Web. <http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/stable/818944>

“The Intellectual Freedom Committee.” British Columbia Library Association. Web. 6 Jan. 2013. <http://www.bcla.bc.ca/ifc/default.aspx>

Tobin, Anne-Marie. “Study Says Canadian Literature Isn’t Taught enough in High Schools.” Canadian Press, 15 Apr. 2002. Web. 13 Jan. 2013.

White, Harry. Anatomy of Censorship: Why the Censors Have it Wrong. Maryland: University Press of America, 1997.

White, Mary Lou. “Censorship – Threat over Children’s Books.” The Elementary School Journal 75.1 (1974): 2-10. Web. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1000464>

Writers’ Trust of Canada. “English-language Canadian Literature in High Schools.” The Canada Council for the Arts. April 2002. Web. <http://www.canadacouncil.ca/publications_e/research/aud_access/di127234254927656250.htm>