Posted on by rjonakait

It Was So Age-Inappropriate What I Read (concluded)

If you believe age-inappropriate reading material is stuff that is not just beyond kids’ reading comprehension but is harmful to them, I present myself for a case study. As a young schoolkid, perhaps because I was shy, I read constantly, even while walking to and from school. It was not long before I felt I had exhausted the offerings of the children’s section of the local public library. Luck befell me in the person of Miss Dahlberg, my sixth-grade teacher. She saw that I was a reader and perhaps knew that there were few books in my house. She seemed also to understand that there was little left for me to explore in the children’s section of the Mead Public Library.

One day after school, Miss Dahlberg took me downtown and talked with the librarians. She knew how to hold her ground. (None of us kids would have been surprised. We all knew she had been a WAC during WWII and had even parachuted out of a plane!) I don’t remember at what age one qualified to take books out of the adult section, but it certainly was not the sixth grade. Even so, what had been rigid rules for the library were no match for Ebba Dahlberg. I walked out with a library card that granted me adult privileges. (Actually, inked on it was “Adult Priviledges.” Miss Dahlberg knew how to be gracious in victory. She noted the misspelling and told me as we left the library that it would not matter.. She also told me to keep secret that I now had access to the entire library.)

This was not something that was part of her duties, but it opened up worlds for me. I have always appreciated it. As an adult, I found Miss Dahlberg’s address in the upstate town where she had retired and wrote her a letter thanking her. She probably had no idea who I was. However, in her reply she was grateful that I remembered that she wrote on the blackboard with yellow chalk, which she purchased from her own funds. She used the yellow because she thought it stood out better and students could see it better.

This golden library card allowed me to enter a new stage in my reading and gave me entrée to all the age-inappropriate materials the library housed. I did not return to the children’s section even though I had not in fact exhausted it. Only as an adult did I read such classics as Winnie the Pooh and Alice in Wonderland.

I had no direction in my exploration of the adult library. I had no method for finding what to check out other than walking through the stacks, glancing at jacket copy, reading a few paragraphs or pages, and then using gut intuition to take out books.

I remember little of what I read from these directionless days, and that seems significant. If books were too shocking for my adolescent sensibilities, if they exposed me to harmful content, if in some way they damaged me, I should recall those books. I remember only two.

The first was The Mouse that Roared, and its sequels, by Leonard Wibberley. The Cold War satire was a delight, a precursor in my mind to Dr. Strangelove. Like that movie, it also encouraged my emerging views that the powerful -– whether military, political, corporate, or social -– were not to be trusted. If I had then talked with anybody about books, I would have insisted they read it. Surely there are some uptight people who would have tried to prevent me from reading these books, claiming they were age inappropriate, because they were “subversive.” They got readers to question the existing order. I can’t imagine that these books were harmful to me unless there is something wrong with learning about the power and fun of good satire. Of course, I may not yet have learned a basic fact about satire as put by Jonathan Swift: “Satire, being leveled at all, is never resented for an offense by any, since every individual person makes bold to understand it of others.”

The other book I remember from my adult privileges was not a random encounter as was The Mouse. I don’t know how I had heard of From Here to Eternity by James Jones (perhaps because the 1953 movie caused such a stir), but I sought it out. Not finding it on the shelves of the Mead Public Library in that staid period, I learned that the book was too explosive or controversial to be allowed on the shelves. A potential reader had to ask for it at the front desk. I did, and this caused consternation. No one apparently wanted to be the one responsible for corrupting this youth by letting him leave the library with this book. I insisted, however, that the library had granted me “adult priviledges.” After much discussion behind closed doors, the book was produced, and I was allowed to check it out. Perhaps the library staff did not want to take on Miss Dahlberg again.

Eternity was the first adult book that mesmerized me. I don’t know why the book was behind the counter, but I assume that it had something to do with adulterous sex. I don’t even remember that. While the sprawling narrative was captivating, it was the character of Robert E. Lee Prewitt that totally grabbed me—a Hamlet, a Tony Zale, a Miles Davis, a Kierkegaardian zen figure, a lover, a friend, an anti-authoritarian, a patriot. Was I harmed by this age-inappropriate book? I don’t remember the sex. Was it explicit? If so, I didn’t understand it. Instead, I felt that the book helped me grow because the Prewitt character talked to me as I closed in on the teenage years of alienation.

If reading age-inappropriate stuff harms kids, I must have been mightily damaged. Perhaps if you get to know me you will spot all the ways I was harmed. But that is not how I feel about my experience. I would have been much more damaged if I had not had stuff to read. To restrict me to the exhausted children’s library would have produced boredom and alienation. Education should be a time of exploration, and we should never deny children that opportunity.

Posted on by rjonakait · 1 Comment

It Was So Age-Inappropriate What I Read

My grade and high schools must have had libraries, but I have little memory of them. I certainly don’t remember any controversies surrounding what books they should or should not shelve. On the other hand, I have many memories of the Mead Public Library, the facility that served the entire town of 45,000. I went there obsessively. It was a two-story building with the adult section on the entrance floor and the children’s books upstairs.

I gave little thought to who or how it was decided what books were in the children’s library. The decision, no doubt, was made by the librarians as to what was age appropriate. Appropriateness, I would guess, had to do with reading ability. Third graders were not ready for War and Peace or Descartes. Such books would be in the adult section.

Now, however, books are kept from children not just because of vocabulary, complexity, or length. Instead, the books in many places are segregated because the subject is not considered age-appropriate or, as an Arkansas statute says, because the book will be “harmful” to the young reader or even because it may make a reader “uncomfortable.”

Take Heather Has Two Mommies by Lesléa Newman. It has been frequently removed from shelves for being age-inappropriate, but it is written with a simple vocabulary and structure with innocent, colorful illustrations. It is not age-inappropriate for first and second graders because it is too difficult to read. Instead, some adults insist it is age-inappropriate because of its subject matter. The book readily accepts as normal a same-sex relationship, although nothing in the book states that Heather’s mothers have sex. Is this age inappropriate? The answer should be no.

If children are asking about a topic, a book in age-appropriate language is not inappropriate. It is only natural for curious kids to wonder why they have a mother and father while another child has two mommies or only one parent or only a grandmother. Books written at a suitable language level about divorce, single motherhood, and untimely death are appropriate for kids who wonder about such things. The same is true for a family with two mothers or fathers. Heather has been banned not because young’uns are not inherently interested in the topic but because adults are uncomfortable with it.

Some book removers go further when books for kids deal more directly with sexuality. They maintain that the goal of the authors and librarians is to groom or indoctrinate children. If the fear is that schoolkids will be transformed into  gay or trans or nonbinary people, it’s just plain silly…worse, ignorant. On the other hand, these books introduce the concept that gay, lesbian, trans, nonbinary, and other queer folk should be accepted into the community, should be free from legal and societal discrimination, should be treated with the same respect as we treat others. (I recall there being something in the Bible about loving thy neighbor as thyself.) However, if that’s the kind of dangerous indoctrination the censors fear, they may be right.  

Attacking books because of their sexuality might mask broader concerns than just gay sex.  What comes to mind is what Masha Gessen wrote about Vladimir Putin in The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. When Putin feels politically vulnerable, he launches anti-gay attacks. He has produced his own version of don’t-say-gay laws by enacting legislation that bans “homosexual propaganda.” Putin has also anticipated those loyal Americans who don’t want topics taught that might make school kids uncomfortable. Russia under Putin “protects” kids not merely by eliminating reference to homosexuality. He has also banned “any mention of death, violence, suicide, domestic abuse, unhappiness, and, really, life itself.” In putting in place these restrictions, Putin has said that he is defending “traditional values.” As far as I am aware, however, he has not said that he was promoting “family values.” When he is criticized, Putin has been a master at diverting that criticism by attacking gays.

When I hear concerns that books are in the library for purposes of  “indoctrinating” children, I think back to what I recall of my elementary school reading. I remember few of the books I consumed except for a series which I labeled in my mind the “orange biographies” because they all had orange bindings. Of appropriate length and vocabulary for a third grader, they were hero books with an emphasis on the childhoods of the likes of Thomas Edison or Andrew Jackson, but they also contained enough about the subject’s adulthoods for me to learn a bit of history. These books have stayed with me on some level, forming some of my background knowledge about various personages and historical eras. Looked at another way, however, they were books that indoctrinated.

Although the spouse remembers an orange biography about the first woman doctor, almost all were about men. Although there might have been biographies about Booker T. Washington or Washington Carver, almost all were about whites. They were about “great” white men with little, if any, suggestion that “ordinary” people did important things. They were all about Americans as if “foreigners” could not or did not contribute to a better world. The books were a subliminal indoctrination into the American myth that any American child (at least any white male) could become a great person—just work hard and live right and, perhaps, be a little adventurous. The subliminal corollary to this belief, however, is that if you or your parents have not become rich, are not powerful, or are not important, it is your or their fault. (David Maraniss reports in A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Family that the playwright Arthur Miller thought Americans had the tendency to blame themselves for economic shortcomings and not the economic system. He theorizes that this proclivity to blame oneself prevented America from ever facing a real challenge to the economic system.)

So yes. Reading indoctrinates. By using a much less charged synonym, however, we also know that reading teaches. That is, of course, why education should present all sorts of information and all sorts of views to children. Presentation of only one viewpoint might be indoctrination; presenting more than that gives a child a true opportunity to learn.

(The fear by conservatives of indoctrination in our schools is not new, but the concern over subject matter has not remained constant. I found it amusing when I read that William “Big Bill” Thompson ran for Chicago mayor in the 1920s on an America First platform charging that the English monarchy was planting pro-British propaganda in the Chicago schools. Sarah Churchwell, “America First” in Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, Myth America: Historians Take the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past.)

Concluded June 19