Defining Censorship Down: Progressive complaints over “book bans” in schools misconceive the relationship between democracy and public education.

The tension between parents exercising control over their children’s education on one hand and the whims of zealous bureaucrats on the other is not new. Founders of the country’s public school system, such as Horace Mann, saw educators as a secular priesthood tasked with molding the social values of the young. Without a state-led education system, Mann argued in his 1839 “The Necessity of Education in a Republican Government” address, even “the ablest pastor” will have little luck in shaping the behavior and manners of his congregation. Mann saw adults as having a “fixed character,” unlike children, and compared a church’s efforts in correcting that character to “one solitary arborist working, single-handed and alone, in a wide forest, where there are hundreds of stooping and contorted trees.”

John Dewey elaborated on these themes, seeking to fuse the values of democratic governance and education. Their purpose, Dewey wrote in his seminal Democracy and Education, is to demand a “social return” from the public and to ensure that the “opportunity for development of distinctive capacities be afforded all.” According to Dewey, “The notion that the ‘essentials’ of elementary education are the three R’s mechanically treated, is based upon ignorance of the essentials needed for realization of democratic ideals.”

On this view, public schools are not mere creations of a democratic society subject to popular control. They make democracy attainable and shape the values of future citizens, rendering moral instruction from teachers a necessity. As progressives expand the meaning of “democracy” to include catering to various identity groups, attempts by parents to modify public school curricula have thus come under attack as illegitimate, illiberal, or a threat to the country itself.

In reality, no liberal principles are at stake here. A superintendent removing explicit texts from a mandatory curriculum or school library is hardly censorship. A local school board responding to an outcry from parents is hardly an attack on democratic values. Nobody claims that the Marquis de Sade is being censored because his work is not used in health class or available for checkout. Schools have a finite amount of time and resources each school year to instruct students, and whether children should be exposed to certain texts is ultimately a question of the allocation of taxpayer dollars.

In any case, progressives who think schools must make pornographic texts widely available for the purposes of social justice should consider our recent history. The country managed to expand the franchise, pass the Civil Rights Act, and legalize abortion and gay marriage without letting kids walk into a public school and read a graphic novel featuring the sexual encounters of transgender-identifying minors. For the Left, the kids have been alright for some time now.