A school district in Florida has made the bold and bewildering decision to ban dictionaries (dictionaries!) from its libraries on the grounds that allowing children to read them violates a law aimed at protecting children from sexual content.
Under HB 1069, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis in May, Florida residents have the right to demand the removal of any library book that “depicts or describes sexual conduct.”
“As the world goes mad,” Gov. DeSantis said in a statement announcing the new law, “Florida represents a refuge of sanity and a citadel of normalcy.”
Mmmkay.
The bill was part of a sweeping package of bills called Let Kids Be Kids. I remember it being a very big deal when we all got calculators in fifth grade because one kid showed the rest of us how to use boring old numbers to spell funny words for female anatomy.
Kids will, in fact, be kids.
Meanwhile …
“The American Heritage Children’s Dictionary, Webster’s Dictionary for Students and Merriam-Webster’s Elementary Dictionary are among more than 2,800 books that have been pulled from Escambia County school libraries and placed into storage,” Judd Legum reports in Popular Information. “Along with dictionaries, the books removed from Escambia County school libraries as a result of this process include eight different encyclopedias, two thesauruses and five editions of The Guinness Book of World Records.”
PEN America, an actual refuge of sanity, has joined five authors and two parents in a lawsuit against the Escambia County School District and Escambia County School Board.
“In the 1970s, schools sought to bar ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ and books edited by Langston Hughes,” the lawsuit states. “Tomorrow, it could be books about Christianity, the country’s founders or war heroes. All of these removals run afoul of the First Amendment, which is rightly disinterested in the cause du jour.
“The plaintiffs have joined together in this lawsuit to vindicate the rights of parents, students, authors and book publishers,” the suit continues, “to ensure that public school libraries continue to serve all communities and provide spaces dedicated to the exploration and dissemination of a wide variety of ideas, points of view, and experiences.”
Also, dictionaries.
I hope the lawsuit is successful and the children of Escambia County are once again allowed to look up words.
I also hope it’s successful as a precedent-setter. Children’s ability to access knowledge should not be dependent on the whims of some grown-ups who are afraid of what will transpire when kids learn the proper definition of words they’re already exposed to daily — on magazine covers and billboards and hamburger commercials and Monday Night Football and sitcoms and movie posters and TikTok and their calculators.
Definitions are not the enemy. Dictionaries are not the enemy. Thesauruses are not the enemy. Encyclopedias are not the enemy. Knowledge is not the enemy.
They’re also not value systems.
If you want your kid to practice abstinence until marriage, tell your kid to practice abstinence until marriage. If you want your kid to avoid certain behaviors, tell your kid to avoid certain behaviors. Explain why. We get no guarantees that our kids will honor our wishes, but we do get to try.
What we don’t get to do — ought not to try to do — is ban our way out of uncomfortable conversations. It’s not fair to kids — ours or other people’s.
It’s also a fool’s errand.
Children are, and should be, curious. They are, and should be, curious about body parts and what people do with them. And they are better served, in every way, when they’re provided accurate, shame-free answers.
Study after study shows that comprehensive sex ed leads to lower rates of sexual activity, sexually risky behaviors, sexually transmitted infections and teen pregnancy.
And it should go without saying, but apparently it doesn’t: A child is far better served looking up a word — any word — in a dictionary than typing that word into Google, where a world of images, videos and misleading garbage awaits.
Whether the dictionary ban is an unintended consequence of HB 1069 or the very thing this goofball law set out to do, we owe our kids better.
We owe them a clearer understanding of the world and the people around them.
We owe them a better comprehension of their own bodies and autonomy and health and safety and, yes, pleasure.
We owe them a stronger shot at approaching their future relationships with awareness and confidence, rather than uncertainty and shame.
We owe them clarity about who they are and who they want to become.
We don’t offer them any of that when we avoid their questions and cut them off from answers.
We can do better.
Join the Heidi Stevens Balancing Act Facebook group, where she continues the conversation around her columns and hosts occasional live chats.
Twitter @heidistevens13
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