Censorship by Omission

I’ve just finished reading the proposed Texas State Board of Education reading list.

In fairness, it contains a number of worthwhile works that introduce students to foundational texts in American history and culture. Yet it is also unmistakably the product of a Republican-controlled State Board of Education, reflecting a distinctly conservative vision of what students should read.

Biblical passages appear at nearly every grade level, Nothing comparable is drawn from Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or other religious traditions, despite the growing religious diversity of Texas classrooms.

Its political leanings are equally unmistakable. High school students encounter Margaret Thatcher’s “Eulogy for President Reagan,” Ayn Rand’s “What Is Capitalism?” (from Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal), and Thomas Sowell’s “Flattering Unction” (from The Vision of the Anointed).

Missing are serious countervailing perspectives that might encourage students to weigh competing ideas rather than inherit a single ideological framework.

Although students read excerpts from Martin Luther King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” major literary voices are conspicuously absent. Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Sandra Cisneros. Prominent Asian-American writers are nowhere to be found.

Mark Twain is absent as well, conveniently avoiding the controversies surrounding Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, while Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird has likewise disappeared.

The proposed list, scheduled to take effect in 2030 if approved, has already been reduced from roughly 300 works to 200. Among those removed were The Great Gatsby, The Alchemist, The Hate U Give, and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Even more striking is the absence of books published during the past half century. Lois Lowry’s The Giver, a riveting dystopian novel introducing middle-school readers to questions of memory, conformity, and moral choice—is missing.

So is Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a coming-of-age novel confronting trauma, mental illness, and adolescence.

Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, one of the defining memoirs of twentieth-century America, is absent as well.

What remains is a reading list whose omissions reveal its priorities as clearly as its selections. This is less an exercise in literary judgment than an attempt to shape civic identity through selective reading.

The response has been swift. PEN America, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the American Federation of Teachers have all criticized the proposal.

While many states publish recommended reading lists, Texas’s carries unusual weight in defining what students are expected to encounter and, just as importantly, what they are not.

In the end, this is censorship by omission.

At a moment when reading proficiency is declining and many young people struggle to finish even a single book, schools should be placing in students’ hands works that ignite curiosity rather than merely satisfy ideological objectives.

Jason Reynolds’s Long Way Down, for example, can be read in a single evening. A fifteen-year-old boy enters an elevator intent on avenging his brother’s murder; at every floor another ghost steps inside. The novel is impossible to put down, yet its real power lies in the moral questions that linger long after the final page.

The same can be said of Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken, the extraordinary true story of Olympic runner Louis Zamperini, whose survival of a plane crash, weeks adrift at sea, and years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, becomes ultimately a story not simply of endurance, but of forgiveness.

A good book invites a conversation with its author. It excites. It unsettles. It enlarges the imagination.

Reading lists are, by necessity, adult constructions. But Alan Jacobs, in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction” (2011), reminds us that the deepest reading often begins elsewhere, not with official lists, but with curiosity.

The books that stay with us are frequently those discovered by chance, books that cultivate sustained attention amid the constant distractions of modern life.

—RJ