NCAC Censorship News Issue #67:

by Joan E. Bertin

Here we go again. A parent complains about a book used in her son’s reading class, so the superintendent takes it off the reading list. This happened even though the book has earned praise from librarians and educators, the teacher thinks it’s a good teaching tool, a faculty committee agreed with that judgment, and most of the kids like it.

Here we go again. A parent complains about a book used in her son’s reading class, so the superintendent takes it off the reading list. This happened even though the book has earned praise from librarians and educators, the teacher thinks it’s a good teaching tool, a faculty committee agreed with that judgment, and most of the kids like it.

The book in question is Robert Lipsyte’s One Fat Summer. According to a summary of the book in The New York Times, it’s the story of a boy who is overweight and the target of a bully. In the book, he learns how to confront both the bully and his weight problem. He also has a tame erotic fantasy, which is described in rather oblique terms, he is kidnapped by the bully and threatened with a gun, and he gets in a fight.

The place is the Jonas Salk Middle School in Levittown, Long Island. A faculty committee appointed to consider the parent’s complaint that the book was inappropriate for 7th graders concluded that the book was realistic and not sensational, and that it contained important messages about maturity that were appropriate for young teenagers. The faculty committee voted to retain the book but was overruled by Superintendent Herman A. Sirois, who reportedly decided that the book “served no major instructional purposes.” This sounds like double-talk. I suspect he’s afraid to defend a book that could possibly, however mistakenly, be characterized as containing sex and violence. By that standard, he’d have a problem defending the Bible and Shakespeare.

Teachers continuously rethink their materials, and sometimes they do so in response to comments or other reactions from students and parents. Perhaps if students were no longer motivated by this book, or failed to relate to its message, it would have been dropped from the curriculum long ago. But that is not the case. The book has been successfully used in this class for ten years. So why should a single parent’s complaint trigger this series of events? This seems to be a case of a school official who caves at the first hint of controversy and simply is not willing to stand up for First Amendment principles, even in an easy case, and even though those principles are central to the educational mission.

So much for the notion that reading almost anything – whether you like it or approve of it or agree with it – can be instructive, if it is handled properly. Should we not teach children about the Holocaust, because we find it represents depraved conduct? Should we ban pictures of lynchings because they are offensive and terrifying? History is different, you might say, because those things really happened. But fiction has equally important lessons to convey, because it provides us with other perspectives on things that happen in life, or might happen. Stories may represent the writer’s effort to make meaning out of confusing events, meet difficult challenges, or simply entertain. As with history, we don’t have to like the message or even agree with it to learn something from it. Sometimes, the most instructive books are the ones we dislike, because they force us to think hard about why we think and feel the way we do.

Removing this book from the required reading list is censorship, pure and simple. This is true even if other books would be equally good teaching tools and even though the book will be available as optional reading. The Superintendent has still ruled that this book is off limits for required reading lists. These, presumably, are the books that all students read and discuss in a group, as distinct from books students may read on their own. Ironically, the more difficult the subject-matter and content of a book, the more desirable it is that students read it under the direction of a teacher and have an opportunity to discuss it and ask questions. As things stand now, students have lost the opportunity to do that with One Fat Summer. What will drop off the reading lists in Levittown next? Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men? Mark Twain’s Huckeberry Finn? Judy Blume’s Forever? Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five? All these classic books are among the most frequently challenged books for young adults, according to the American Library Association, and all of them have serious literary themes and educational value. But the same is true of One Fat Summer.

The teachers in Levittown must feel professionally undermined and personally abandoned. In a letter to Superintendent Sirois, the National Coalition on Censorship also observed that teachers “must be very puzzled as to what constitutes appropriate reading material.” But it’s the kids in the Levittown public schools who are likely to suffer the most – what they’ll get for required reading will be only the blandest, most conventional, books that nobody could possibly object to. Boring.

Reprinted from the Viewpoint section of Newsday on June 13, 1997.