In providing students with a curriculum that reflects the widest possible range of viewpoints, school administrations increasingly find themselves under attack by opponents of intellectual freedom. Although in some cases the opposition is justified, in others it merely reflects a growing trend toward intolerance. With religious fundamentalism taking a prominent role in local, state, and federal politics, school censorship has become an issue that shows no signs of abating.
Censorship is a critical issue because it is closely related to the function of education in society. From the very beginnings of the public school movement in America, school administrators assumed the dual responsibility of instructing students in the prevailing social and economic values of society while concomitantly exposing them to a diversity of viewpoints. From their inception, schools were given the mandate to "civilize" their charges, to take "children at random from a great city, undisciplined, uninstructed, often with inveterate forwardness and obstinacy, and with the inherited stupidity of centuries of ignorant ancestors; forming them from animals into intellectual beings . . . " (Jansen, 1988, p. 156). Even parents of the early secondary schools objected to this indoctrination of mainstream values, but it was not until the 1970s that communities began to take an activist role in school censorship issues.
Today, statistics indicate that school censorship is on the rise. In 1985, more than 130 school textbook incidents took place. These incidents were spread out over 44 states (Peck, 1992, p. 191). During the 1994-95 school year, the annual report issed by the People for the American Way disclosed that 338 attempts were made to remove books from classrooms or libraries and that another 120 cases of "broad-based challenges to public education" occurred throughout the country (Morgan, 1995a, p. 179). About fifty percent of the book removal...