The cost of reading—or not reading

 

Supply and demand has been on my mind lately—and I’m not thinking of gas prices. I just paid what I think is an outrageously high price for a digital book. Normally I would not consider such, but this is the latest addition to a series that I really enjoy. I got to wondering why it was so high. The author has a good following. You might even call her a bestseller. And probably she’s won awards along the way for the long-running series. But we’re not talking Danielle Steele or Sandra Brown popular here (thank goodness!).

The demand for books can’t be high enough and the supply sparse enough to cause this. Banning books, the current right-wing attack on culture, surely hasn’t been that effective, although in some cases it has caused a jump in sales of the offending book. Take, for instance, last year’s title, Forget the Alamo! When Dan Patrick cancelled a program by the book’s authors at the Bullock museum, sales shot up. More recently, a decades-old book about the Holocaust, Maus by Art Spiegelman, became an instant bestseller after it was banned by a Tennessee school board. Another banned book doing well is the young-adult title, Gender Queer: A Memoir, by Maia Kobabe.

Book banning is not new. Public libraries have received over 11,000 requests to ban books since 1982. But these days right-wing conservatives have carried it to a fever pitch. Their targets are almost exclusively books that deal with racism or sexual orientation and their victims are either trans kids or young people of color, both vulnerable populations who desperately need the education and depth of knowledge that can come from reading a widely.

No surprise that, under Greg Abbott, Texas has been a leader in this disgraceful  movement. Of 850 books on a suspect list submitted by Representative Matt Krause of Fort Worth (please vote blue!), 62% dealt with sexual issues. Do you suppose Krause read all of them? Any of them? In Oklahoma, a new law restricts approved reading lists to books by white male authors. Shall we just go back to the days before Gutenberg invented printing and hire some monks to hand-copy? How ridiculous is to ban books by women, especially in this day and age. The law is being appealed in the courts.

The rationale given for these archaic measures is that books about sex and race (and the history of those subjects in America) might upset students, even high school students who are usually reading books intended for the general adult audience. But who ever said life is going to be comfortable? How can young people learn empathy, a leadership skill sadly lacking in some of our leaders, if they don’t read (and please don’t tell me church—there are churches, and there are churches). How can they learn to be critical thinkers? And therein lies the rub.

Abbott, Patrick, and others don’t want critical thinkers. They want a population who will believe outrageous disinformation and vote accordingly, keeping them in office. Simultaneously they have launched an all-out attack on public education, a bulwark of the American system since the days of Thomas Jefferson. With an eye toward privatizing schools (charter schools, for instance, which are for profit), they are preaching the low standards and dangers of public schools, at the same time treating teachers so badly they are fleeing the classroom. No wonder there’s a quality problem.

I was appalled to read a thread on Facebook recently where people wrote “anything to keep kids out of public school” and “public schools do nothing but indoctrinate” (Wow! They have that shoe on the wrong foot!) At the risk of being an education snob, I guess that most who accept Abbott’s authoritarian stances and condemn public education are themselves poorly educated. They are the ones who see socialism, that big bugaboo, lurking in every Democratic heart. To object, they cry “Communism,” or “Fascism” with no idea what they are talking about. They have swallowed the disinformation. Someone should ask them to write papers defining socialism, communism, and fascism.

What can we do to counter these trends? Examine each candidate’s platform on education, including books; quiz them; study their public pronouncements. Support your local library and its reading programs, especially for young people. Read widely yourself, keep up on issues—and learn to recognize disinformation. Support Texans for the Right to Read, a coalition formed by the Texas Library Association. Here’s a link: Texas Library Association Forms Coalition to Battle Book Bans (publishersweekly.com)

I’ll step off my soapbox now.