Tilting at Windmills

I wanted to respond to the following comment that appeared on a recent post.

The following authors have been banned in some public school classrooms:

1. Alvin Schwartz
2. Judy Blume
3. Robert Cormier
4. J.K. Rowling
5. Michael Willhoite
6. Katherine Paterson
7. Stephen King8. Maya Angelou
9. R.L. Stine
10. John Steinbeck

If you stick to private schools you will not only be able to teach the classics but be called by your first name!

The list of books is the only part of this comment that I do not take issue with. It comes from the American Library Association, and it is actually the list of challenged authors. According to the ALA, a challenge occurs when a book is recommended for removal, whereas a ban is a successful censoring. I searched their website for a breakdown of public vs. private schools, but they don't separate the data that way.

The distinction seems trivial to me, especially considering the fact that it in no way records books that were never made available in the first place. I suspect that if fewer books are banned in private schools, it is only because private schools give parents much more control in curriculum selection. I found many stories of parents switching to private schools because they had lost a challenge to a book in a public school, and especially considering that most private schools are still religiously affiliated, I am willing to bet that as a group, they offer far less intellectual freedom.

I will assume that the schools referenced in this comment are purely secular. Even so, I have no desire to teach at those institutions. Since I decided to devote myself to education, many people have recommended that I go the private school route. I don't see the point. The types of students that attend private schools are as varied as their reasons why, but they all have one thing in common- parents that care about their education. This is a better predictor of success than any IQ test. Private school students are probably going to succeed in life regardless of how competent the particular school is. To me, it would feel like a fireman rushing to save a baby from a building that isn't burning.

As far as the allegedly superior success rates of private schools, I think the evidence is dubious at best. These schools have the luxury of hand-picking students. Whether specializing in troubled students, gifted students, or religiously conservative ones, the schools get to choose the niche in which they will be most effective. Public schools teach everyone. They turn no one away, and their finished product suffers accordingly.

I am getting into this to make a difference, and the place where I can affect the most change is in the trenches of public education. Sure I could find a school that perfectly compliments my convictions, where my career would be trouble-free, but again, I really don't see the point.

Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil

Yesterday I did something that I hoped I would never have to do. I deleted a comment on this blog.

Pencils Down was created to help me be proactive in my own education. I was tired of waiting around for school to start, and I knew there were plenty of experienced educators out there that I could learn from immediately. And so, this blog was born. Since its inception, I have tried to maintain a congenial dialog, and although the conversation is far more one-sided than I would like (hint to all you lurkers out there,) I feel that I am achieving my goal. I have learned so much already about what it means to be a teacher and about the state of the profession, and I haven't had a single formal class yet. So many of you have become virtual mentors of mine, and I thank you.

As a life-long proponent of free speech, I fully support the right to voice opinions that conflict with mine. I relish the friendly debate that follows and I never take offense. Discussing issues with the opposition helps me to crystalise my own beliefs, which is why the Perpendicular Bisectors roll exists. This is where I link to blogs whose authors, more often than not, are posting things which I either can't relate to or vehemently disagree with. But it's that contrast, that chance for learning, that I crave and why I'm blogging in the first place.

So when I deleted that comment, I did it with a heavy heart. It was a comment on one of the Danika McKellar posts and it was extremely sexual in nature. The commenter, who I know in real life, was trying to be funny and to get a rise out of me. If the comment had been made in a face-to-face conversation, I would have thought nothing of it. But it wasn't. It was written here for all my readers to see, and it was in direct conflict with the idea of the post, which was that women can excel at math just like men, that they should be respected colleagues and not just sex objects. The comment, while lurid, was auto-biographical in nature. I have no doubt that its author was telling the truth, but since he posted anonymously and with no ability for you to follow to his homepage, I felt that the statement led nowhere intellectually and was potentially offensive. So it went the way of the dodo.

Was this a mistake? I don't know, you tell me. What do you all do with your blogs? Is it okay to leave crass language and potentially offensive comments up? Or is the kind of censorship I employed justified?