Foiling the Secret Censors
A response to “How to Fight Book Bans and Censorship” by Kelly Jensen, et. al.
Published on Feb 1, 2023, “How to Fight Book Bans and Censorship” offers timely guidance to communities striving to guard public education from an assembly of half-organized mobs set on banning books they find “woke” or otherwise objectionable.
Some suggestions are better than others.
In distinguishing a Tennessee ban on “Maus” from a curriculum update that replaced “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Jensen proposes “Intent is key.” That cannot work. When describing their decisions, a disingenuous committee will merely copy’n’paste “acceptable intentions,” shifting the burden for those opposing censorship to those contesting any specific decision to ban a book, rather than those seeking to challenge them.
Typically, focusing on ‘intent’ privileges whoever holds the most power at the expense of everyone else. In this case, that would risk depriving children of books even as they learn how to read them and develop voices of their own.
Outcomes should be key, not intentions. If “parental choice” means certain parents can impose costs that interfere with educational outcomes of other people’s children, then their “choice” rewards saboteurs pretending to speak for a community, but actually merely raising obstacles for other people. A community should disregard such claims.
Refiguring the costs of a book challenge
Kelly Jensen briefly touches on the cost of a book challenge with some “back of the envelope math,” reaching a figure of $575 for the Francis Howell School District in Missouri to challenge “Monday’s Not Coming.” It’s an appropriate question, because if it costs almost 10% of the total allocated in that state per pupil just to conduct one book challenge, it seriously and meaningfully squanders resources intended for public education.
But there’s more to the process of counting the costs that should be considered.
Jensen assumes the entire committee buys a copy of a book and then reads it in response to a challenge, which amounts to a “good faith” review process. However, the example Jensen selected is a 400+ page novel, or a 10 hour audiobook. Unless the committee is comprised exclusively of remarkable speed readers, to actually review it in a good faith process, they’d need closer to 50 hours in total for a 5-person committee. That tweaks numbers a bit:
- $750 — assuming there are 5 members of a review committee, that each reads the book in 10 hours (rather than being a speed reader), that the average wage of each reader is $15/hr
- $37.50 — 2.5 hours of discussion time at a meeting (5 people participate in a single 30 minute discussion, at average wages of $15/hr)
- $10.99 + sales tax (purchase a single paperback copy from Amazon, trade that copy among all of the committee members)
Comes to about $800, rather than $575.
But what happens if they actually ban this book?
With 9 middle and high schools and a total of roughly 900 staff, every teacher and staff member in the directory will need to receive an instruction, “Ban this book!” — read and understand that instruction — and then act to comply with it. Would that take 5 minutes per staff (30 seconds to read the instruction, plus time to review each book shelf and ensure that the book is not present)? If so, then this ban would cost another 75 hours of time.
At an average wage of $15/hr, that raises the total cost closer to $2000, not the $151 reported by the district, not the $575 proposed by Jensen.
Yet that’s still barely scratching the surface of the true costs.
The Secret Censor: Authoritarianism and Book Bans
A district might contain the costs of review — save that $800 and instead spend closer to the $151 initially reported — by ceding authority to ban books to a single gatekeeper who reads the book, issues a recommendation, and is generally rubber stamped by the committee.
Unless a community knows and authorizes this gatekeeper to speak for the entire community, this is a ‘bad faith’ process. It would be cheaper than $575 or $800. But it would also mean the community imposed a “censor-in-chief.” Where does this person appear on the school budget? Did the censor win a political office in an election?
If “parental choice” means the appointment of secret censors who comply with book ban requests from certain community members, then instead of democratic processes, that community endorsed authoritarianism. Americans have died in wars against authoritarians and tyrants. Some people would claim that such sacrifices are sacred. At the very least, they’re not covered by any measurement focused upon monetary value.
Yet many people blithely shrug at the value of freedom when it comes to people or materials they don’t care for — and even this measure misses the most important consideration of all to the kids themselves.
The Real Cost to Students
What if every person on the committee (and every teacher forced to follow the committee’s rules) was also capable of using the time it took to challenge one book to tutor a single child on how to read?
Average wages per hour overlook the fact that certain people could allocate their hours to meet certain needs, which will not be met unless someone else makes up the difference. Did any students fall behind in reading, say as a consequence of a pandemic, or other real affairs that really affect real children in a real world?
Allocating 50 to 125 hours to challenging one book might not reduce the total amount of hours available for any specific child — it could be that a community is overflowing with people willing and able to help. More likely, there just aren’t so many such people around. Most likely, the people serving on the review committee might be among the few individuals with the time available to tutor children. Instead, they spent those hours determining whether to restrict some book.
How many hours? 50? 75? 125? More?
An after-school tutoring program might provide 1-hour of personal reading assistance to 1 child for 5 days a week. Such programs can achieve meaningful results. Yet if those programs are tied up in fights over exactly which books can be used and which cannot, the time is not available to help a child learn to read.
Indeed, if people can ban books they’ve never read at all, they teach children the value of reading in an entirely different way: don’t bother. Read only what we tell you to read, and only the way we tell you to read it. Good luck unteaching that lesson.
Every other cost of book challenges is trivial compared to these problems.
A Modest Proposal: Draft the Book Banners as Tutors
Most people clamoring to ban books in recent years heard about objectionable books, slogans, acronyms, and other subjects on the television or through the internet, never bothered to read the objectionable materials, and simply hope to engage in a nasty sort of sport, a literary game of ‘whack-a-mole’ financed at the taxpayers (and the childrens’) expense.
How to distinguish people looking to play a nasty game from those seriously invested into a community and into children’s education? Outcomes matter, best measured in hours.
Charging the ‘upstanding members of society’ for the cost of implementing a book ban would be a start, but unfortunately, only a few people exist in any community willing and able to educate children. Even if the committee spends 50 hours to review a book, every member of that committee might have otherwise spent those hours personally tutoring a child who is struggling to learn to read.
Thus, unless a person allocates the same time to educating children that it would take to review and implement a book challenge, the children will suffer from these challenges. That’s worth considerably more than $151, $800, or even $2000. We ought to charge such individuals the full amount of time they impose upon a community — a total of 125 hours of community service spent teaching a child who has fallen behind grade level (ideally, from a pool of children assigned randomly by the school district).
Community members too busy to invest those 125 hours are too busy to challenge any specific book. They don’t know what they’re speaking about. The mere fact they can parrot talking points offered by television broadcasts gives them no right to impose their beliefs upon their community.
Until the 125 hours that would be lost responding to one book challenge are recovered by the school district, no book challenge should be considered. Doing it any other way rewards those who seek to shift costs to education onto others. Whether the people doing so are paragons of moral virtue or noxious busybodies, all that matters is student performance: bring a kid up who has fallen behind, a kid you had no duty toward save as part of a shared community, and then you may earn the right to judge teachers, librarians, and the books themselves.
But the community pays for the schools! Why don’t they have a say?
A silly but common objection. Try using this to challenge a police officer who imposes a traffic citation upon you, “Hey, I pay taxes! I’m not gonna pay this ticket!”
Of course, an individual MAY challenge the police in court — over a ticket or any other complaint. But those costs of challenges are always paid, whether by a public defender paid for at the public’s expense, or by people paying the costs themselves.
Parents and community members who seek greater power to challenge books than the power they have to challenge the police act in bad faith, seeking more power than any right or law confers upon them, UNLESS they prove themselves to a community by teaching other people’s children, making whole the costs they would otherwise inflict upon a community.
