Two news items highlight how divisive public schooling in the United States is today, and how much worse it could potentially be were we ever to adopt a national curriculum.
The first article tackles Banned Books Week, an event organized by the American Library Association, the American Civil Liberties Union, and other groups, that will feature readings all over the nation of controversial books like Judy Blume’s Forever and Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War. According to the ALA, in 2006 there were over 546 challenges to books held in public and school libraries. Unfortunately, what the article neglects to mention is that in our public schools and libraries such battles are both inevitable and, no matter what the outcome, always result in the crushing of someone’s rights. As long as libraries are paid for by all taxpayers, all taxpayers have equal rights to demand both that the libraries carry the books they want and NOT carry material they find objectionable. One man’s book-banning battle is another’s revolt against compelled support of repugnant speech.
In Okinawa, Japan, the subject of the second article, we see just what kind of widespread acrimony a national curriculum can produce, again because all people are forced to support teachings imposed by the most politically powerful group, and because there is no alternative to government-sanctioned content, no matter how controversial that content might be. According to The Japan Times, on Saturday roughly 110,000 people rallied in Okinawa to protest a directive from Japan’s education ministry that history textbook publishers strike references in their books to military-imposed civilian suicides in the 1945 Battle of Okinawa. Were the United States ever to adopt a national history curriculum, imagine the fights we’d have over the treatment of race, religion, class, etc? And we don’t even have to think about something as inherently values-laden as history. Just look at the acrimony that’s accompanied our on-going “reading wars” and you can easily imagine the conflict any national standards would cause.
