On June 10, the Hadley Middle School Board of Education in Glen Ellyn reversed its prior decision to exclude the obscene and sexually graphic The Perks of Being a Wallflower from its independent reading program. This second vote was 6-1 in favor of retaining the book, with the lone wise and courageous opposing vote coming from school board president, Sam Black.

The school board voted to strengthen the parental notification letter that goes out to parents at the beginning of the year by adding a euphemistic caution, warning parents that particular books contain “mature” content. Yes, nothing says “maturity” quite like masturbating with a hot dog, homosexual sodomy between teenagers, and the use of obscene language.

For a parental notification letter to be meaningful, it should avoid vague and euphemistic language like “mature content.” Teachers should include clear and explicit descriptions of the “mature  content.” For example, in the case of Perks the notification should state that the book includes obscene language and depictions (in some cases graphic depictions) of masturbation, homosexual sodomy, heterosexual teen intercourse, incest, rape, and bestiality.

One aspect of the controversy that has received too little press are the actions of teachers who exploited their positions and power in the classroom to promote their views with little regard for how their political activity would affect students. It has been reported that the three teachers who spoke at prior school board meetings in favor of Perks and who expressed their views on the community controversy in class, Tina Booth,  Lynn Bruno, and Ali Tannenbaum, also  wore paraphernalia  with messages about  book banning or “FREADOM” during school activities.

There are far too many political activists/ “agents of change” masquerading as “educators” in American classrooms. They rely on their anonymity and autonomy to use their publicly subsidized positions to try to shape the moral and political views of other people’s children. They do it through curricula, through supplementary resources that are never reviewed by department chairs or curriculum review committees, and through their classroom comments and actions of which parents remain largely unaware. Community members should demand that school boards create policy to stop these abuses of power on the parts of teachers—most of whom hold “progressive” views.

One report on the school board meeting states that The Perks of Being a Wallflower  “will again be allowed for independent reading purposes for eighth graders, as will any other legal book that teachers choose to offer as an option for students.” Community members should ask what criteria teachers use in determining what they “choose to offer as an option for students.” 

Ever in thrall to celebrity, some students asked author Judy Blume to make a statement in opposition to “book banning.” Apparently, Blume’s status as celebrated author makes her an expert on educational philosophy, the use of public resources, the First Amendment, psychology, sociology, and ethics—all of which are relevant to this discussion. (What’s curious is that when IFI writes about a school issue, encouraging taxpayers to contact school board members, the press often describes IFI as an “outside” organization in an apparent attempt to delegitimize our efforts. I have yet to see any articles in which Florida-based author Blume is described as an “outsider.”)

These students  also wrote to Hollywood  actor and activist Anne Hathaway who promotes the normalization of homosexuality because her brother is homosexual; Chris Colfer, homosexual actor on dissolute teen television show Glee; and Logan Lerman one of the stars of The Perks of Being a Wallflower film. Perhaps they chose Hathaway and Colfer because these Hadley students understand that one of the goals of Perks is to normalize homosexuality.

The school board believes that as long as parents have the right to decide whether their child reads Perks, it’s legitimate to spend public funds to purchase and include it in the independent reading curriculum. This “solution” to the controversy ignores three critical questions:

• Should public resources be spent on highly controversial books with language so obscene and sexual content so graphic and in some cases perverse that they couldn’t be read over the PA system or printed in newspapers? 

• Is it the position of those teachers who support the acquisition and use of Perks that they never take into account the nature and extent of obscene language or sexual content when considering the purchase or use of books for school? If they do make the claim that they never take into account the nature and extent of obscene language or sexual content when selecting texts for purchase or use, they’re either lying or our schools have even bigger problems than it appears. If they say they do take into account obscene language and sexual content when making literary decisions, then they should be asked if they, therefore, engage in book-banning. 

• Some defend the purchase and use of Perks in public schools because students are already familiar with the controversial content. This is another way of saying that curricula should reflect culture. If that is the educational philosophy of Hadley, what happens as culture continues to degenerate? Are there any objective standards regarding obscene language and sexual content that should be included in text-selection criteria? 

Conservatives need to be as tenacious in pursuing sound school policy as “progressives” are in undermining it. It should be unthinkable that any public school would have this book in its library or that any teacher would permit students to choose it for a class project. We have allowed the culture to desensitize us to vulgarity and perversion. We have allowed the ridicule of the “cool” people to silence us. And we have allowed the rationalization that minor concessions to an obscene culture and Leftist teachers are unimportant.

When in doubt about the wisdom, reasonableness, or truth of your position on a controversial issue, look to see who is on the other side. You should feel reassured that you’re on the right side when you see that most Hollywood actors and Neuqua Valley High School math teacher Hemant Mehta* (aka “The Friendly Atheist”) are on the other side.

*Click here and here to learn more about Neuqua Valley math teacher Hemant Mehta who has written on the Hadley controversy and oh so much more.

Click HERE to support the work and ministry of IFI.
With your support we can continue our vital work!

By Meghan Cox Curdon, Wall Street Journal

Raise questions about self-mutilation and incest as a young-adult theme and all hell breaks loose.

If the American Library Association were inclined to burn people in effigy, I might well have gone up in smoke these past few days. ALA members, mostly librarians and other book-industry folk, are concluding their annual conference today in New Orleans, and it’s a fair bet that some of them are still fuming about an article of mine that appeared in these pages earlier this month.

The essay, titled “Darkness Too Visible,” discussed the way in which young-adult literature invites teenagers to wallow in ugliness, barbarity, dysfunction and cruelty. By focusing on the dark currents in the genre, I was of course no more damning all young-adult literature than a person writing about reality TV is damning all television, but from the frenzied reaction you would have thought I had called for the torching of libraries.

Within hours of the essay’s appearance it became a leading topic on Twitter. Indignant defenders of young-adult literature called me “idiotic,” “narrow-minded,” “brittle,” “ignorant,” “shrewish,” “irresponsible” and “reprehensible.” Authors Judy Blume and Libba Bray suggested that I was giving succor to book-banners. Author Lauren Myracle took the charge a stage further, accusing me of “formulating an argument not just against ‘dark’ YA [young-adult] books, but against the very act of reading itself.” The ALA, in a letter to The Journal, saw “danger” in my argument, saying that it “encourages a culture of fear around YA literature.”

The odd thing is that I wasn’t tracking some rare, outlier tendency. As book reviewer Janice Haraydaobserved, commenting on my essay: “Anyone who writes about children’s books regularly knows that [Mrs. Gurdon] hasn’t made up this trend. . . . Books, like movies, keep getting more lurid.”

They do indeed. I began my piece by relating the experience of a Maryland woman who went to a bookstore looking for a novel to give her 13-year-old daughter and who left empty-handed, discouraged by the apparently unremitting darkness of books in the young-adult section. To her and many other parents, the young-adult category seems guided by a kind of grotesque fun-house sensibility, in which teenage turbulence is distorted, magnified and reflected back at young readers.

For families, the calculus is less crude than some notion of fictional inputs determining factual outputs; of monkey read, monkey do. It has more to do with a child’s happiness and tenderness of heart, with what furnishes the young mind. If there is no frigate like a book, as Emily Dickinson wrote, it’s hardly surprising that parents might prefer their teenagers to sail somewhere other than to the lands of rape, substance abuse and mutilation.

But, to some, those are desirable destinations. Many of the angriest responses to my essay came from people who believe that a major purpose of young-adult fiction is therapeutic. “YA Saves!” was the rallying hashtag of thousands of Twitter posters who chose to express their ire in 140 characters or less.

It is true that so-called problem novels may be helpful to children in anguished circumstances. The larger question is whether books about rape, incest, eating disorders and “cutting” (self-mutilation) help to normalize such behaviors for the vast majority of children who are merely living through the routine ordeals of adolescence.

There are real-world reasons for caution. For years, federal researchers could not understand why drug- and tobacco-prevention programs seemed to be associated with greater drug and tobacco use. It turned out that children, while grasping the idea that drugs were bad, also absorbed the meta-message that adults expected teens to take drugs. Well-intentioned messages, in other words, can have the unintended consequence of opening the door to expectations and behaviors that might otherwise remain closed.

If you think, as many do, that novels can’t possibly have such an effect, ask yourself: When you press a wonderful, classic children’s book into a 13-year-old’s hands, are you doing so in the belief that the book will make no difference to her outlook and imagination, that it is merely a passing entertainment? Or do you believe that, somehow, it will affect and influence her? And if that power is true for one book, why not for another?

It so happened that, as the Twitterverse was roiling over “Darkness Too Visible,” I received an advanced reader’s copy of an “edgy paranormal” teen novel coming out in August. Have a look at the excerpt on the back cover, where publishers try to hook potential buyers: “I used to squirm when I heard people talking about cutting-taking a razor to your own flesh never seemed logical to me. But in reality, it’s wonderful. You can cut into yourself all the frustrations people take out on you.” Now ask yourself: Is a book the only thing being sold here?

In the outpouring of response to my essay, I’ve been told that I fail to understand the brutal realities faced by modern teens. Adolescence, I’ve been instructed, is a prolonged period of racism, homophobia, bullying, eating disorders, abusive sexual episodes, and every other manner of unpleasantness.

Author Sherman Alexie asked, in a piece for WSJ.com titled “Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood”: “Does Mrs. Gurdon honestly believe that a sexually explicit YA novel might somehow traumatize a teen mother? Does she believe that a YA novel about murder and rape will somehow shock a teenager whose life has been damaged by murder and rape? Does she believe a dystopian novel will frighten a kid who already lives in hell?”

No, I don’t. I also don’t believe that the vast majority of American teenagers live in anything like hell. Adolescence can be a turbulent time, but it doesn’t last forever and often-leaving aside the saddest cases-it feels more dramatic at the time than it will in retrospect. It is surely worth our taking into account whether we do young people a disservice by seeming to endorse the worst that life has to offer.

Sharon Slaney, who works at a high school in Idaho, touched on this nicely in an online rebuke of her irate librarian colleagues: “You are naive if you think young people can read a dark and violent book that sits on the library shelves and not believe that that behavior must be condoned by the adults in their school life.” It is that question-the condoning of the language and content of a strong current in young-adult literature-that creates the parental dilemma at the core of my essay. It should hardly be an outrage to discuss the subject.

Mrs. Gurdon is the Journal’s children’s books reviewer.