The Curriculum Policy of Book Banning in Schools

The Goals and Strategies of Gifted Education Programs

When we consider how to design and develop curriculum for the gifted, we proceed to analyze their needs and their capacities as a special population at various stages of development. Most successful have been assessment tools that allow us to know how advanced students may be at given stages of development in specific areas such as math, reading, and scientific inquiry. Based on data from tens of thousands of students annually, we know that, in general, gifted learners are advanced by 2 years or more in selected areas of learning, demonstrating a readiness for advanced work. However, we also want students to develop skill sets that engage them in higher level thought and decision-making skills that prepare them for leadership roles. The following list of goals is fairly typical of schools to advertise when describing their gifted programs:

- to develop critical thinking,

These goals encapsulate both affective and cognitive concerns for development and are used across grade levels from K-12. Teachers at different grade levels must decide how these goals may be addressed. In language arts and English classrooms, many districts use a combination of core texts with supplementary materials in order to differentiate effectively for advanced learners through discussion and debate, projects, and presentations. They also employ strategies that are interdisciplinary and open-ended, group-based, and linked to real-world problem-solving through techniques such as problem-based learning or competitions such as History Day or Model U.N. The strategies commonly employed in these approaches would be discussion groups, using question-asking, Socratic seminars, and other inquiry-based tools. The common employment of debate and argument is also encouraged.

Developing habits of mind is also considered critical to the development of good thinking. Thus, students begin to consider how to be objective in their views, how to employ skepticism in considering alternative ideas, how to develop curiosity about phenomena in the world, and how to become innovative in their perspectives. These habits of mind pervade the types of questions they consider about real-world issues.

A sample discussion/activity set might center on the importance of teaching critical thinking itself, using a question tree such as the following:

Issue: Should we teach students to think about real-world problems?

The substance of a challenging language arts program for the gifted would contain the focus on higher level goals and measurable approaches to assess their success. By using activities that are engaging, that require higher level thinking, and that use the deliberate tools of reasoning, teachers can make material selections for reading that best match the goals delineated.

Underlying Tissue and Tools for Such Advanced Learning

At the ripe old age of 80, I have decided I want to read all of the Nobel Prize winners in literature and current National Book Award winners as well. Why? Because I no longer have time to read just anything that comes my way; I want to ensure I am grappling with interesting characters and situations that speak to problems and issues in the world. Such reading allows me to be immersed in the best works written in the modern age. Occasionally, I will want to drift back to my classical section on the bookshelf—to Plato, Aristotle, Euripides, and Virgil and always to Shakespeare. These writers assure me of the universality of human thought, motivation, and action. Exposure to and reading of the highest quality literature is a life-time goal, best fulfilled at a pace and extent of one’s choosing.

Yet, we must be taught to know what great literature is and what are the universal themes and truths found in that literature that have salience today. The thematic motifs of Shakespeare on alienation, oppression, and family dynamics resonate today in contemporary authors such as Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, and Joyce Carol Oates. Students need access to their wisdom as well as Shakespeare’s. Students need to read the biographies of Nobel Prize winners rather than memoirs of celebrities to understand adversity, hard work, and talent development in the service of others. To read the life of Marie Curie, for example, causes students to reflect on what matters in life—money and prestige or the knowledge that millions of people will have been helped by your work? Biographical resources like the following may impact students from elementary through high school to consider their career pathway in new ways:

• Ignotofsky, R. (2016). Women in science: 50 fearless pioneers who changed the world. Ten Speed Press.

Concept Development Through Books

One way to best understand a concept is to consider its opposite. So, we study injustice as a way to understand justice; we study freedom to understand oppression. Yet, some of the books on lists to be banned are the very best books to teach these concepts. Maus II is one example, a book written as a graphic novel by Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize–winning author. It tells the story of mice, imprisoned and malnourished at the hands of their captors, a fairy tale of the Holocaust, if you will. Through the use of animal characters as substitutes for human beings, Spiegelman is able to convey the horrors of the ordeal without imposing the trauma that might be encountered if the characters were human. Through empathy for the fate of the mice, he engenders pity in his readers for the need to fight oppression in all its forms and to recognize it when it occurs. He allows students the opportunity to examine, at a safe distance, how cruelty toward others, because they are different, affects lives for generations to come and how it changes society itself.

This graphic novel has been taught for over 20 years to gifted seventh graders as part of a unit on the 1940s as a decade of change, alongside John Hersey’s novel Hiroshima on the dropping of the atomic bomb. Through the use of questions that spark lively discussions to the projects that engage students in both critical and creative thinking and problem-solving, the texts drive the deeper understanding of issues still with us today. The textual analysis that students do through the use of these powerful readings elevates their sensitivity to human frailty, to thinking about how problems are handled in the real world, and to considering if a moral world can be forged and if so, how?

Yet, Maus II is an example of a prime text that has been removed from library shelves and classrooms. It no longer may be a part of many gifted programs. Why? It is unclear that a logical answer exists. It has been reported that the focus on the holocaust is inappropriate material for students before high school; the phrase “developmentally appropriate” has been used even though these students are functionally operating at high school level in respect to reading comprehension. Another reason listed has been the nature of the material itself—teaching about the holocaust is not seen as important in some communities. Is it less important than teaching about the Revolutionary War or the Civil War? Does not showing the results of ongoing war on ravished victims tell an important story? Why would that not be so?

When community members begin to take over the curriculum, in general, they are also taking over the specialized curriculum designed for special learners, with no appreciation for the thought that lay behind the design of specialized units of study for such learners. Reading advanced material is central to a literature curriculum for the gifted; one of the most commonly identified skills found when they enter school is their advanced reading ability.

Reading then is the foundation of advanced learning in our society, not just for being able to communicate information in a universal language but also for providing the rich conceptual understanding of writers about their world. Great books and great authors have produced a legacy to bolster the learning of generations to come. But, students must have access to that legacy (we must remember that banning is often a precursor to burning).

Teachers must be able to teach Shakespeare when they feel students are ready; students must learn about the holocaust of Maus II when they can understand its significance in today’s world; Toni Morrison’s work must be taught when students can absorb the oppression felt by her characters. These touchstone authors and works must be applied to an advanced curriculum in a sensible way, but they must be used in order to provide markers for literary excellence and the authenticity of the human experience found on their pages.

When texts are banned or limited from student access in any way, the act diminishes the level of knowledge and insight that students may gain from such reading; it restricts understanding of others’ perspectives, both of authors and characters. Is there a substitute for Kafka’s Metamorphosis?

Substitution of texts, based on language concerns or controversial handling of an issue, often affects the degree of challenge of the alternative text selected. Choosing advanced reading texts is a full-time job for many librarians and curriculum developers who have the knowledge and skill set to do it; it is not best done by a committee with limited knowledge and a political agenda.

Use of excerpts rather than full text dilutes language and ideas and simplifies needed complexity to grapple with real-world problems. It reduces reading to a process of gathering information rather than gaining insight into humanity and its problems, making it an end (decoding of words) rather than a means to enlightenment. Thus, it thwarts the best of what gifted education has offered in the past and can offer in the future. It denigrates great literature, minimizing intellectual thought and the question of what it means to be human as the true purposes of teaching great literature.

Unintended consequences

Any policy that deliberately removes challenging text from young readers who are ready to handle it also limits the level and type of thinking that such students do and that they may engage in through discourse with each other and an instructor. It obliterates great literature from the curriculum that could help students see universal themes and ideas that join and unite people rather than separate them.

It “dumbs down” their reading to literature that lacks protagonists who are problem-solvers, that lacks controversial ideas, and that lacks rich language. It limits the reading by all students of the best texts and the best authors who have written on particular topics for which they as authors have expertise. It inhibits discourse on important themes and issues of the day.

It may be fair to say that educational policies may have negative influences that were never intended. I doubt that the groups seeking to ban library books from shelves understand the importance of controversial literature in stimulating thinking and encouraging question-asking and leading students to desire discourse about important ideas like oppression and justice. I doubt that they quite grasp the importance of great literature in raising the aspirations of groups in our society, of providing hope for a better world.

So, there is a need to collect data on questions like: What have been the types and extent of impacts from book bans on different entities over the last 3- to 5-year period? On individual schools and libraries, on students, on families? We need to know the short-term effects of such policies as well as to be concerned about their long-term effects as well. What books have been eliminated that were staples in gifted programs? What replacements have been recommended? How much fiction has been replaced with nonfiction? What concepts are no longer being taught in gifted programs?

Conclusion

The power of books as vessels to take us miles away, as Dickinson opined, should always be an open channel to dreams and thoughts never considered, to the intellectual world of concepts needing to be explored and studied, and to the world of tentative knowledge where we understand that absolutism has no place in real learning; only free and open inquiry does. That freedom to inquire begins with great books.