Why Are Schools Full of Explicit Books?

I can only muster a sigh of exhaustion at the start of this fall’s beloved holiday celebration. I’m speaking, of course, about “Banned Books Week.” According to the American Library Association (ALA), the literary victims of censorship include books such as Gender Queer and Lawn Boy. Predictably, the ALA makes no mention of the sexually explicit content in these books — books that the Left has censored such as Irreversible Damage, or the wide availability of these “banned” books, which you can bravely buy for $29.95 a pop off a prominent display at your local Barnes & Noble.

But these observations of irony and hypocrisy are now commonplace. Even authors at left-wing outlets such as Slate and the New York Times are starting to realize that it might be inadvisable to distribute books with depictions of “adult bodies having sex” and “detailed drawings of genitals” to children.

Instead, I want to ask different questions: How and why did sexually explicit and politically charged books end up on school shelves in the first place? Someone had to buy and place them there.

Understanding this present reality requires a return to the 1960s, when student radicals wanted to change the very telos of our education system from an academic training ground in pursuit of truth to institutions of political advocacy. Students protested not just against the Vietnam War but also for the deconstruction of the traditional canon, increased student control over curricula, and an almost neurotic obsession with identity. In chronicling these movements, influential philosopher of education Henry Giroux criticized mere liberals who remained committed to “modernist assumptions” compared with radical who recognized “no privileged place” for “art works, scientific achievements, and philosophical traditions.”

Since then, our universities, and by extension our K–12 schools, have been embroiled in these same debates. Writing about the canon wars of the 1980s and ’90s, political philosopher John Searle observes that the arguments were not about “opening up” the canon; instead, the “whole idea of the canon’” had to be abolished. It’s not enough to replace Tolstoy with Langston Hughes. Any objective standards pertaining to beauty, truth, goodness, the very idea of educated itself — all had to go.

This same ideological urge to destroy the canon continues today under different guises. For example, #DisruptTexts is a teacher-led “effort” to “challenge the traditional canon.” In a farcical move that one might mistake for satire, the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) declared last year that “the time has come to decenter book reading” from our English classrooms.

And herein lies the explanation for how our schools filled up with glorified smut and politically charged books: In obliterating commitments to objectivity and dethroning the traditional Western canon, progressives created a vacuum and everything else came forth to fill it. If we no longer require our students to read Shakespeare for his historical significance and aesthetic superiority, anything else can be justified for any reason.

Traditionally, education has been viewed as a transmission of sorts — handing along from one generation to the next an intellectual inheritance, a collection of knowledge worth knowing. If this inheritance is not only arbitrary and worthless but oppressive too, then schools are left grasping for a new foundation. Engagement, cultural relevance, individual teacher obsessions, and student choice all exist as alternative reasons for the selection of this or that book, but they all prove flimsy under pressure.

If student choice and cultural relevance, for example, take primacy, then students encounter only that which already interests them, following their own insular interests into solipsism. If engagement is our priority, then what’s more engaging than sex, drugs, and violence? On the grounds of “engagement” alone, every book loses to Call of Duty or a cellphone’s ping. And so, students get books that are high engagement but low difficulty — at best, the inanity of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and at worst, graphic novels depicting sexual acts. It’s the literary equivalent of a parent replacing carrots with Doritos and calling it a success because at least the kid is eating.

At the extreme end, the inculcation of approved (see: progressive) opinions becomes the motivating force. For example, in another policy brief, the NCTE recommends that, if teachers must read classic literature, that they do so through a “critical lens” including “postcolonial criticism, black feminist criticism, and chicana feminist criticism.” Where it addresses practical applications, the brief suggests watching documentaries about current events or using Taylor Swift songs to interrogate toxic masculinity in The Great Gatsby.

When first principles pervade our educational institutions, there needn’t be one nefarious actor or small cabal of organizations advocating to get It’s Perfectly Normal onto elementary-school shelves. Rather, when industry leaders such as the ASCD endorse decolonizing curriculum, when the School Library Journal suggests replacing To Kill a Mockingbird with Stamped, then local librarians, schoolteachers, and curriculum developers across the country act accordingly.

For this reason, mere bans on questionable content are insufficient. Even if librarians remove Gender Queer from every school library, would we be satisfied with students analyzing TikTok videos through a social-justice lens in their English classes?

Ironically, in his criticism of conservatism and traditionalism, Giroux presents the solution to his own radicalism. He laments how the former secretary of education William Bennett tried to revitalize American education:

He urged a massive curricular revision, the central features of which were resuscitating math and science education, concentrating on transmitting the canonical works of Western civilization as a required part of the undergraduate curricula of elite colleges and universities, and emphasizing values such as respect for authority, especially in the family, as well as patriotism.

When relevance replaces quality, when student interest dominates historical significance, when engagement supersedes learning, it’s almost inevitable that attention-grabbing but mediocre literature will begin to pervade our schools. If we instead fill our schools with beautiful literature, if we emphasize virtue in the character of our students, there will be neither time in the day nor a desire in their hearts for superficial radicalism or base writings.