Nope. You’re not Allowed to Read That

Before cancel culture, there was… cancel culture. Years ago, I was visiting with a graduate of the school where I was teaching and serving as a part-time principal. After graduation, he had gone on to attend a well-known Bible School in Canada.  I asked him how he liked it. Overall, he was positive except for one thing. He said the library was limited.

 “Limited? What do you mean?”

He paused before answering. He didn’t use the word censored but that’s what he was describing. Some authors carried a caution sticker on the spine of their books. Sort of like the rating system used for movies. In particular, one author was singled out by the librarian- C.S. Lewis.

Maybe the issue with C.S. Lewis was that he featured witches and magic in some of his stories. Or, maybe it was the fact that he smoked a pipe.  Really benign stuff.  No comparison with what’s going on today.   

If I were to give the benefit of the doubt to the librarian, I could say her actions were motivated by the desire to “protect.” The same isn’t the case of today’s culture of book censorship.

When you think about it historically, the reading of certain books was prohibited in order to promote and reflect a particular narrative by those in political authority.  Those with the power to include and exclude content did so to maintain power. Their power.

Books are meant to be doors, an entrance into different viewpoints, worldviews, and cultures. Seeing books as simply mirrors results in the kind of crazy that is now Princeton University.

Last summer, after the university announced it would remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from a prominent school on account of his racism, several faculty members demanded in an open letter that the administration go much further, to make Princeton “for the first time in its history, an antiracist institution.” One of the co-authors of the letter, a member of the Classics Department named Dan-el Padilla Peralta, has subsequently made clear that this means his own field — the study and teaching of the history and literature of ancient Greece and Rome — must die “as quickly as possible.”

~ Reported by Damon Linker of The New Republic magazine, February 8, 2021.

Linker goes on to say:

Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Virgil, Ovid, Tacitus, Cicero, Livy — to become conversant in the writings of these authors and learn about the worlds in which they lived is to be placed into conversation with some of the greatest minds about some of the most monumental events in human history. It is to become culturally literate on the highest levels. It is an education in how to think, in how to achieve self-understanding and a salutary humility about our own vaunted superiority. It is to learn how to begin liberating ourselves from our own prejudices.

Whereas refusing to read these authors and learn about their worlds — or to do so merely in order to melt them down in the moral acids of our own unexamined certainties — is to close ourselves off both from our own past and from the possibility of living a fully self-aware life in the present.

Introduce your children to literature and writers who have stood the test of time. One great resource I’ve found for books and authors that meet this standard is Eight Day Books. A treasure trove of good reading and a way to support small businesses in this age of Amazon!

Reading widely and thinking critically about what you’ve read is an important key to your student’s education. Please don’t neglect this, and don’t cave to the academic bullies of higher education, so called. 

Thanks for reading!

Curt Bumcrot, MRE

For home schooling families living near or between Corvallis and Newport, Rachel Stewart and Shannon Heisler are offering group achievement testing the first week of May.  If you’d like to join one of their groups, here’s their contact information:

Toledo             May 2 & 9         Rachel Stewart  Phone: 503-580-5503

Email: curlycue1987@gmail.com

Newport           May 4 & 5         Shannon Heisler Phone: 757-818-1823

Email: nobossame@yahoo.com

For a complete listing of remote and in-person test dates, go here: https://www.basicskills.net/testing/.

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One of our former employees and a home school mom herself, Becky Hafer, is involved in a worthwhile kick starter project, an online Forum and on-demand Resource Center for Spell to Write and Read by Wanda Sanseri. We highly recommend Wanda’s reading materials and have used them with our own children. 

To see a video explaining the project, to here: