Sigh! I just finished a very long letter to the Virginia State Board of Education. I told them why it’s a bad idea to mandate that school boards have their teachers send out annually a聽list of course texts annotated with the words 鈥渟exually explicit鈥� when they or someone, somehow feels a text merits this description聽.
So, if the 聽pass, 聽the event on page 75 聽of a text where the two characters fondle one another or on pages 111-113 where the mother gives birth or the scene in which one character thinks about what he and another might do but decides not to follow through鈥攁ll these and more would be candidates for the 鈥渟exually explicit鈥� label鈥攃andidates if an individual school board defined them as such.
起点传媒has been involved in arguing against this policy since 2013 when it was first introduced in a State Board public forum, then again last spring when it became 聽and was , again 聽last fall when it was incorporated in the state accreditation standards, and now when it is proposed as amendments into the school board regulations.
How can we help parents, guardians, and policy makers understand three things?
Text selection is an educator鈥檚 job.
Selecting materials requires in-depth knowledge: not just of students’ backgrounds and learning experiences, but also of their abilities and interests; not just of educational objectives, but of the best practices and range and quality of materials for meeting them; not just of the particular work being considered, but of its place within the medium, genre, epoch, etc., it represents.
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Labeling books 鈥渟exually explicit,鈥� or anything else for that matter, is a blatant form of ,听
a 鈥減ractice [that] reduces complex literary works to a few isolated elements — those that some individuals may find objectionable — rather than viewing the work as a whole.鈥�
A popular entertainment rating system like the , which by the Motion Picture Association鈥檚 own admission do not聽rate educational value, is not an appropriate system for rating texts we use in schools.
Where is the understanding that literature is so much more than the sum of its parts, that as one聽Kansas Director of Instruction noted,
鈥淭here is a lesson in each and every book, especially in the hands of a gifted teacher鈥�?