CULTIVATE READING FREEDOM, BUT BASE IT ON STUDENT MATURITY

Only nine official complaints over books have been filed at Southeast Tennessee public school districts in recent years.

With the uproar across the country about children in schools having access to books that discuss homosexuality, violence, drug use and divisive racial concepts, among other controversial topics, several reasons suggest to us the relatively low number.

› School librarians and teachers are doing a reasonable job to determine what is proper and what is not proper for agelevel reading.

› Parents are teaching their children to think on their own and make their own decisions about what is relevant reading material and what is not even while they continue to train them in a moral worldview.

› Parents have such a positive, loving relationship with their children that they believe they would come to them and ask them about language and subjects that are unfamiliar to them and deserve explanation in the books they are reading.

› Students beyond perhaps the third grade don’t share with their parents what they’re reading for pleasure or what is available in their libraries for reading.

› Parents don’t care what their children are reading, figuring through television, movies, video games and other platforms they’re bound to get a social education.

We’d like to think the first three reasons are why the official number of complaints is so low, and we have no doubt those reasons are true for many school professionals, parents and students, but we suspect the latter two categories are probably the overriding reasons.

If our conjecture is true and most parents don’t care — within reason — what their children are reading, what is the responsibility of schools, librarians and teachers?

We agree with the opinion of Xan Lasko, chair of the Tennessee Association of School Librarians’ intellectual freedom committee, who told this newspaper’s Shannon Coan, “We have to have books for all kinds of people. If they don’t see themselves in a book, then they’re not going to come in and try to find a book because they don’t feel at home.”

However, that opinion must be tempered with ageappropriateness, as Whitwell Elementary Principal Nicole Condra seemed to indicated to Coan: “Book selections will be neutral, where children can just enjoy being read to, in a safe environment.”

In other words, we can’t hide from students from the world, but they should be exposed to it as they’re mature enough to handle it.

Yes, as we’ve written before, some third graders are reading on a sixth grade level, and some sixth graders can’t grasp what some third graders can, but that doesn’t mean every subject matter should be on the table for new readers once they’re able to string three words together into a sentence.

We remember, for instance, the matronly but worldly Pansy Griffin, who thought her third graders could handle the sad state of orphans in “The Boxcar Children” because of the adventures they eventually encountered, and the threat of fearsome panthers and bears and a lonesome, howling wind in “Little House in the Big Woods” because the family members always had each other to count on.

Then, as the years went by, the themes of subject matter available in library books deepened and broadened.

So by the time late middle school (then junior high, now 50 years ago) rolled around, the frank subject matter in “That Certain Summer” — a Scholastic Books novel in which a 14-year-old boy goes to spend the summer with his father, who is in a committed gay relationship — was digestible without being prurient.

In the years since then, various media platforms have offered subject matter of much darker and more divisive themes to children barely able to read. But that doesn’t mean schools have to follow suit.

Thus, we’re glad state lawmakers passed the Age Appropriate Materials Act of 2022, which requires districts to create a policy for developing and reviewing school library collections, and a book review process that allows appeals of library and instructional materials to be filed to the Tennessee Textbook and Instructional Materials Quality Commission.

Maybe, as with Southeast Tennessee, such procedures across the state have been used sparingly, but it should be some comfort to parents that they exist.

For us, we can’t imagine school without the pleasure reading offered, without the increasingly mature books we were allowed to read and without the world they opened up that will last until the book is closed on our lives.

For schools today, we don’t think the process of who can read what should be rocket science, one subject we’ve never tackled. But while the books offered should allow students to see themselves and their life circumstances in what they read, they should only be able to do so as their growing brains and bodies are ready for it.