The American national anthem may tout the country as the “land of the free”, but the legitimacy of that statement is becoming increasingly stretched in 2022, as conservatives have launched a concerted campaign to prevent ideas and books from being presented to schoolchildren.
Republicans in several states have launched efforts to ban books pertaining to race and LGBTQ+ issues from classrooms, while some legislatures are pushing to introduce laws which would ban teachers from discussing homosexuality. Other states have already banned discussion of the modern-day impact of historic racism in the US.
It is a situation that has no parallel in America’s recent history. And in an interview with the Guardian, Suzanne Nossel, CEO of PEN America, a non-profit organization that works to protect freedom of expression in the US, said the efforts to censor education, in particular, fit in with a wider attempt by conservatives to influence society.
“There have been battles and debates that have bubbled up from time to time but the ferocity of this wave of both the education gag orders affecting curricular and book bans is unprecedented,” Nossel said.
“We’re in this pitched moment of historically unprecedented polarization in our country and there is a very potent and intense struggle under way about what the future of our society looks like,” Nossel said.
There are few signs that US polarization will decrease any time soon. Democrats and Republican politicians are deeply divided over issues around education, social care, women’s rights and the pandemic recovery, while only a fifth of Republicans believe Joe Biden was legitimately elected, despite a lack of evidence of widespread election fraud.
In January an NBC News poll found that 70% of Americans believe the country has become so polarized it can no longer solve major issues facing the country.
“Our population is changing. We’re becoming an increasingly pluralistic society, along so many different dimensions and there’s this fierce backlash trying to kind of yank it in the other direction, with the notion that we’re somehow restoring some great path that’s been lost.
“We see that in efforts to curtail voting rights across the country and to empower legislatures to overrule the will of an increasingly diverse population that go to the polls.”
That crusade is increasingly bleeding into education. In the last year, PEN America counted 155 bills introduced in 38 states that would censor what teachers can say or teach in classrooms. In 2022 there has been a “steep rise” in the introduction of what PEN America calls “gag orders”, the organization said.
In Florida a “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which would ban discussion of sexuality and gender identity in schools, was passed by the state senate’s education committee on 8 February, and has been endorsed by Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor. The bill, which must pass the full Florida senate and the house before becoming law, would allow parents to file lawsuits against school boards if they believe policies violate the law.
A bill introduced in the Kansas house on 9 February would change the state’s obscenity law, making it a class B misdemeanor for a teacher to use any material which depicts “homosexuality” in a classroom, while looming legislation in Arizona would allow parents to sue teachers and school districts for perceived violations of parental rights.
In schools, these laws serve to “hobble our educators, and intimidate them in a chilling way”, Nossel said.
“It puts librarians, teachers, principals in a position of having to fear that if they put forward certain ideas, or even if a student puts forward certain ideas, and it gets taken up as a classroom discussion, that they may be subject to discipline or punishment or fines.”
While classroom censorship has become an eagerly embraced hobbyhorse for conservatives, there is little evidence that a majority of parents are demanding more censorship in the classroom or demanding more influence over what their children can read, or be taught.
A CNN poll in early February found that only 12% of Americans believed parents “should have the most sway over which library books are on the shelves and how American history is taught”.
“I think it’s a manufactured issue, to be honest. There aren’t a lot of parents who are rifling through their child’s backpack in horror to discover, you know, a copy of Art Spiegelman’s Maus,” Nossel said.
“I think there are some activists who have realized that by pointing out, whether it’s profanity or controversial ideas in some of these books, they can activate a sense of frustration that parents do have about a range of issues.”
Those issues include the debate about wearing masks in schools, and mixed emotions about the length of pandemic-era school closures.
But censorship has also been pushed by conservative groups linked to deep-pocketed rightwing donors. Groups like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education have been instrumental in book banning attempts in the US, often presenting themselves as small, “grassroots” efforts, while in reality they have links to prominent, wealthy Republicans.
Existing tensions, Nossel said, have “been used to fuel this ideological debate over books and to fire it up”.
“We used to talk about a pocketbook issue here in the United States, an issue that affects people’s pocketbooks.
“This is an issue that affects the backpack. It affects something that’s in the home, that’s very personal and close to home. And so, I think the organizers and the activists feel like they’ve been able to strike a nerve with this, even though the backdrop of parental concern over what’s being read and taught in schools is relatively low.’
There may be no recent parallel for the scale of the conservative crackdown.
Nossel, whose book Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All, serves as a guide to protecting and promoting free speech, said the clearest similarity to the potential prosecution of teachers is from almost 100 years ago, in the Scopes trial, involving the Tennessee science teacher John Scopes.
In 1925 Scopes was accused of violating Tennessee’s recently passed Butler Act, which made it illegal to teach the theory of evolution in public schools. He was found guilty and fined $100, although the verdict was later overturned. After the trial Mississippi passed a similar law, and in the same year Texas banned evolution theory from school textbooks.
More recent parallels can be found in the policing of books and ideas in the Soviet Union, and Russia introduced a “gay propaganda” law in 2013 which in effect made it illegal to equate straight and gay relationships. China has long banned the book Tombstone, Yang Jishen’s recounting of the Great Chinese Famine, which casts a negative light on the country’s communist rulers.
Nossel said it would be going too far to directly equate the situation in the US to those countries – “We’re a democracy here, and that’s extremely important,” she said – but she warned there is an “echo in the tactics”.
“Those situations, obviously, were far, far more severe. But I think we have to be on guard,” Nossel said.
“A lot of us have been surprised about what we’ve witnessed in this country over the last several years. So we can’t be too sanguine about this just being sort of a phase, and a passing trend.”