I grew up in small-town Kansas reading ‘dangerous’ books. All kids deserve that chance

During my junior year of high school, I set out on a mission: to spend the year reading books with controversial reputations, that had sometimes been banned, or whose authors had been blacklisted — an earlier era’s version of “cancel culture.”

It was more interesting than doing my homework.

With three decades of hindsight, it is obvious I had a narrow conception of which books merited attention. The reading list was packed with white guys. I read “Catch-22” by Joseph Heller, “Slaughterhouse-Five” by Kurt Vonnegut, “Johnny Got His Gun” by Dalton Trumbo — anti-war classics, all — and a few others. It was a fantastic, foundational year of reading that continues to shape me.

There was one challenge, though: My conservative little central Kansas hometown had a Christian bookstore, but no place that sold “secular” novels. So I checked all of those “banned” books out of my school library.

Nobody even tried to stop me.

I’ve been thinking about that reading spree as Kansas students return to classrooms for the 2022-23 school year. They do so during a fraught time for public education. Some districts have struggled to hire enough teachers, while others face dire criticism for promoting so-called “critical race theory,” “social-emotional learning” and other conservative boogeymen.

And perhaps more than ever, those students go to school knowing that somebody might be looking over their shoulders when they check out books. Last year, the Goddard school district near Wichita briefly removed a number of books from school shelves — including classics about race and gender, such as Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale,” August Wilson’s “Fences” and Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” — after a parent complained. The district reversed course, but more recently it emailed parents with step-by-step instructions on how to access their children’s school library checkout records.

That’s not just a Goddard thing. Across the state, parents are allowed to see what books their kids have been checking out of the school library. And that’s a challenge for school librarians, torn between their desire to provide a world of reading to their students and the fact they can’t protect their students’ privacy. (At least they don’t face the censors in Missouri, where school librarians could face fines and jail time if they provide “explicit sexual” content to students.)

“You can’t have intellectual freedom without privacy,” Rachel Yoder, president of the Kansas Association of School Librarians, told KMUW in Wichita. “But there’s an added twist to it, as a school librarian.”

So here’s my advice to Kansas parents: You can hover over your kids’ school reading choices. Certainly, it might even be the responsible thing to do where younger children are concerned. But after a certain age — say, maybe the beginning of high school — maybe you shouldn’t.

Those teens will soon be adults, after all, free to make their own choices.

At its best, high school is an age where young people start to decide for themselves which values they’ll embrace. Often, that means kids will bump against the limits of what their parents would choose for them. That’s natural. But that process can only be delayed, not stopped. (And in an era when kids have internet access in their pocket, even delay might be difficult.) So a little leeway is a good thing.

During my year of banned book reading, I came to find out that while some books were alluring because of their controversial status, they didn’t always match my taste or values. I rolled my eyes at the whiny protagonist of J.D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye.” And I put down Robert A. Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” half-finished, because the story disturbingly challenged my Christian faith — and didn’t finish it until after I graduated college.

I’m so glad I got to make the choice to put away those books, instead of having that choice made for me by school administrators or — worse — somebody else’s parents. That was the beginning of adulthood for me. Kansas kids will lose something if they don’t get to make those same choices for themselves.