Florida opens floodgates to vast wave of book censorship

Florida has formalized control of what students read with the aim of purging books that don’t please the governor’s handpicked education commissioner.

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the law March 25 and is about to name an education czar to oversee rules that will mire public schools in red tape and, in divisive political times, are likely to tighten thought control among future voters.

Some opponents liken Florida’s plan to 1930s book burnings under the Nazis or purges by Stalin or Castro, but we find that unfair. Books that fringe thinkers don’t want in class won’t be burned: they’ll simply be attacked and banned in one place and then listed for each of Florida’s 67 counties to ban as well. Books won’t be burned, but the mass scale required for schoolbook use means they may never be printed at all. Very efficient: no seizures, no ashes, and no “undesirable” ideas. 

Given that power, it’s vital that Mr. DeSantis name as education commissioner a thoughtful, open-minded professional educator averse to mind control to limit the damage that can be done by this pernicious law.

It is vital, yes, but unfortunately that is just the kind of unfettered thought that the governor has opposed in his efforts to keep out of classrooms the “wrong” information in favor of the “right” kind. He has positioned himself as a protector of young minds that could be warped by ideas that he discounts. So don’t expect a middle-of-the-road educator in charge; expect a non-educator whose ideas mirror those of Mr. DeSantis.

If you march in lockstep with the governor you’ll be cheering the new education commissioner’s abilities to freeze out ideas that don’t support his policies. But remember, Mr. DeSantis won’t be governor forever, and a successor may have opposite ideas about what children in Florida can read. How smart is it to gear learning to what political forces happen to capture Fort Tallahassee?

“I think it’s going to help give parents a lot of confidence that they can send their kids to school and they’ll get an education but they’re not necessarily going to be indoctrinated in things that are very, very questionable,” the governor said after signing the law, knowing that children instead will be indoctrinated under his control in thoughts that those of other persuasions find “very, very questionable.” 

That’s no way to run a school system.

Let’s look at what the law says.

First, the education department will have online training for everyone who selects school books and reading lists ready by Jan. 1, 2023. All must be trained by July 1, 2023. No books can enter schools without their OK.

Book selectors will learn to be certain that all books are in “alignment to state academic standards.” Other new law creates new standards, one banning classroom mention of theories about racial causes in history. The book selectors are to be the gatekeepers to match current state standards, whatever they might then be.

Meanwhile, the 67 county school boards are responsible for every book in any school and on any reading list. The law requires that a parent serve on every book selection committee in each district. It doesn’t specify how the parents will be chosen, but bet that volunteers won’t be there because they love literature. There is a political agenda here.

Anyone at all who claims that any book is pornographic or does not meet criteria for the course in which it is used or was not the subject of a public notice and review gets a school board hearing. If a school board hearing supports removing a book for any reason, it then goes onto a list sent to every school in the state to see if they want to ban it. That list also goes to all book selectors – the gatekeepers – so they can keep out materials that anyone got removed anywhere.

This is the key: anyone can complain, and if even one district removes a book for any reason, the book is listed for everyone elsewhere to ban. It’s uncomfortably close to a statewide ban-this-book list, and it takes just one Floridian, parent or not, to complain and get a book onto the list.

As a friend wrote, a crank on one side can attack half the books and a crank on the other side can attack the other half and we’ll have no books at all. A handful of determined fringe activists can tie up the schools in hearings and lead to bannings across Florida even if they never opened the books themselves.

Don’t think there aren’t enough cranks. Of the best 100 works of fiction of the 20th century, 46 were banned in one state or another, nine of them in Florida.

Florida is now about to become the proving ground for book bans on a mass scale. A proper choice of apolitical education commissioner could moderate the use of schools as indoctrination factories. Nonetheless, the floodgates have opened to a vast wave of censorship.