Schoolbook Controversies

Report Outline
Challenges to Assigned Reading
Books and Groups in Dispute
Politics of Textbook Selection
Schoolbooks in Context
Special Focus

Challenges to Assigned Reading

Untested Right to Read in Public Schools

On sept. 21, a case is scheduled to go to trial in Spokane, Wash., in which the plaintiffs are asking for a permanent injunction against the use in school of The Learning Tree, an autobiographical novel by Gordon Parks describing the experiences of a black man struggling in white society. The case may not go far, but it is worthy of note because it has so much in common with other actions against books that are being brought by students, parents and teachers in school districts around the country. The cases are testing the novel question of whether school boards and teachers have to take the rights of children and teen-age students into account when assigning reading or stocking libraries.

In a typical dispute, both opponents and defenders of books argue that their constitutional rights are threatened. Each side, supported by phalanxes of lawyers, accuses the other of trying to exercise censorship or purvey propaganda. As students return to school this fall, many will find battles of this kind raging around them. What they read in class or in the library will depend on how these political battles are resolved at school board meetings or in the courts.

The Learning Tree suit, Grove v. Mead School District No. 354, was filed in December 1980 by an attorney for the Moral Majority of Washington Legal Foundation on behalf of parents, who had tried without success to persuade the Mead School District in suburban Spokane to ban the use of the book in courses. The plaintiffs complain that the book contains obscenities, explicit sexual material and blasphemies against Jesus Christ, and they say it purveys “the anti-God religion of humanism which is antithetical to plaintiffs' beliefs and which violates the free exercise and no establishment clauses” of the Constitution. In other words, the plaintiffs argue that assignment of the book in a public school amounts to government promotion of a particular religion and infringes on their right to practice their religion freely.