Banned books, newspapers, some personal history and the value of openness

Here in the midst of National Banned Books Week - not irrelevantly also National Newspaper Week -, I come in praise of my high school English teacher.

I have had many occasions over the years to reflect with gratitude on the impact of Mr. Finch on my literary appetite, but never more than in the past couple of years as I've watched angry bands of parents descend with increasing fury and frequency on school boards to complain about the reading materials being foisted upon the tender minds of their children.

Now, says the American Library Association, the trend is migrating from simple school libraries to public libraries at large.

"Last year, about 16% of demands to remove books involved public libraries. This year, to date, it's 49%," Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the association's Office for Intellectual Freedom, told the Los Angeles Times this week.

What might be next?

These are, to me, and likely to most people who value free expression, worrisome trends. In the 55 years since my high school days, I've lost track of Mr. Finch, but I suspect he would share the concern.

Granted, most of the books he assigned us in a small rural Illinois high school in the late 1960s were far different in content and approach than many that are the source of much wrath today. But many were not, and in that time and that place, some might have been just as culturally incendiary.

So, it has often intrigued me that the literature with which Mr. Finch challenged supposedly impressionable young minds mustered not even interest, let alone complaint, from our parents or our broader communities.

Be assured, Mr. Finch was no fire-breathing '60s radical. In Eureka, Illinois, we barely knew what that was in 1967 and certainly couldn't have imagined one coming to our town. But he was, like most teachers today in my experience, an everyday member of the community with a special commitment to encourage students to learn to think for themselves, advocate for their positions and respect the positions of others. His medium for that mission was the printed page, and he wielded it with sincere commitment and broad tolerance.

His assignments ranged from the routine classics ("Great Expectations," "Huckleberry Finn," "Romeo and Juliet" and so on) to the somewhat current ("The Egg and I," "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden," "Fail Safe" and the like) to the downright challenging ("Black Like Me," "Native Son," "The True Believer" and more).

Among all the titles, "Black Like Me," "Native Son" and "The True Believer" seem particularly relevant in the context of current battlegrounds. Eric Hoffer's "The True Believer" took a rigorous analytical approach to underlying factors for social movements that were simmering on our television screens at the time. "Black Like Me" by John Howard Griffin and Richard Wright's "Native Son" dealt with topics that weren't exactly foreign to us in a universally white environment but were unquestionably more abstract than identifiable. I could envision all three of them being challenged today.

Yet, what strikes me about them as I reflect is that neither in our classrooms, in our family discussions at home (to the extent we would ever discuss something about school with our parents), in our interactions with our teachers nor in our conversations with each other in the hallways, locker rooms or muscle cars, never in any circumstance I can recall, did anyone ever question the appropriateness of the topics we confronted nor did we feel any need to conform our attitudes toward them to some specific standard.

Another teacher, Mr. Hart in Social Studies, offered at least one further memorable example when he required us to read "None Dare Call It Treason," a passionate screed against then-emerging social values in American culture. Although it was highly controversial and something of a renegade in political thought at the time, no one thought to question whether a high school teacher should introduce John Stormer's ideas to teenagers. We accepted the book, along with all the other reading matter of our lives, for what it was as part of a collection of ideas that apparently we'd better get prepared to deal with.

So, I find today's trend toward stifling access to ideas unsettling and counterproductive - and, yes, this extends toward so-called "canceling" of speakers on college campuses. Because of teachers who encouraged debate over and engagement with difficult topics, I gained an understanding of the demands of freedom and of the vastness of the ideas and facts that must be considered in coming to one's own set of values.

Good newspapers, I hope, also advance such understanding. As do bad ones. As do good books and bad. As do, more to the point this week, banned books. So, thank you, Mr. Finch and Mr. Hart and all the teachers and librarians and ministers and Sunday School leaders and streetcorner prophets and unrepentant speechmakers who challenged me and others to rise to the requirements of liberty. I hope we do not let you down.

And I know that if we follow your example and encourage rather than stifle the ideas of others, we cannot.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald.