This case should be a reminder of why it’s really important to vote in those off-year elections, especially when the school board members are up for election. Leslie Pinney is a recently elected school board member in Illinois District 214. According to the Daily Herald, Ms. Pinney was "elected with a vow to bring ‘Christian beliefs into all decision-making.’" And she apparently tried to be true to her word, looking to block a book order that would have replentished the numbers of nine books already in the curriculum on the grounds that the books are pornographic. The books? (source: The Chicago Tribune)

• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
• The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
• The Awakening by Kate Chopin
• Freakonomics by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner
• The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
• Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
• How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents by Julia Alvarez

Much has been made that Ms. Pinney has not read these books, but rather claims that a google search led her to believe that they were pornographic. I’m guessing that, given her backing from conservative fundamentalist groups, she just cross-referenced the school’s book order list with the list from organizations like Parents Against Bad Books in Schools and bing came up with her list.

(For the record — I looked through PABBS "list of lists" — here’s the list of books on the list I’ve personally taught (at least pieces of) in my career — 1984, A Separate Peace (on SLA’s 9th grade list), Am I Blue (Coming Out from the Silence), Black Boy, Brave New World, Canterbury Tales, The Crucible, Death of a Salesman, Fahrenheit 451, Go Tell It on the Mountain, Hamlet (HAMLET?!?!?!), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Jane Eyre, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Othello, The Awakening, The Great Gatsby, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Lottery, The Scarlet Letter, Their Eyes Were Watching God, To Kill A Mockingbird (also on SLA’s 9th grade list) — and I found a ton of my favorite books, books we taught at Beacon but I hadn’t personally taught, books that I’ve always wanted to teach. Take a look at the list. It’s mindboggling.)

The good news here is that the school board voted down the resolution 6-1 and the community came out in droves to debate the issue — most coming down in favor of keeping the books in the curriculum. But the frightening thing is that no one can expect that this is the final salvo in this fight. What’s the old saying — The price of freedom is eternal vigilance….

Interestingly, the Chicago Tribune offered Ms. Pinney the opportunit to respond to her critics — and for her critics to respond to her. The debate has been civil, but overwhelmingly against banning books. Ms. Pinney claims that she never intended to "ban" books, merely to take them off of the required (classroom) lists. The point — made by several commentors — by attempting to stop the purchase order that would bought the class sets of the texts, she was, in effect, banning them.

In the end, English classes in high school are about more than learning grammar, they are a place to debate difficult and challenging ideas. They should be a place where texts challenge us to examine our own lives. Sometimes that means that we have to encounter ideas that push us… frighten us… force us to come to terms with our own beliefs and illusions. By examining our own ideas, by exposing ourselves to dissenting ideas, we grow. The texts that I have read that Ms. Pinney sought to ban (five of the nine) are powerful, challenging, engaging texts. They belong in our schools — and bravo to the community for coming out in support of allowing teachers to teach books that matter, and bravo to the six other board members who stood up and voted Ms. Pinney’s resolution down.