Author Gift | Trouble in Censorville: The Far Right's Assault on Public Education and the Teachers Who are Fighting Back

I received both a free digital and physical copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

Rating | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

This is easily one of the best, most important books I've read this year. If the attack on our education system does not alarm you, you are part of the problem.

Let me be very clear: teachers are not trying to indoctrinate students. If that was our goal, everyone would be kind, wear deodorant, and turn homework in on time.

What we ARE trying to do, however, is provide safe environments for ALL students, and foster communities of inclusion and kindness so that all students know they have a place they belong. Representation matters and I will scream this at the top of my lungs from the top of the mountain until the day I die. All students deserve to see their reality reflected in the books they read and the tv shows and movies they watch. This includes books and graphic novels in classroom libraries and school libraries.

Across the country starting at local levels, the attacks have begun. The curious part of this is that these attacks often start with individuals who don't even have children in the school(s), or district as a whole, that they are targeting. They seem to get the ball rolling in many instances, and then it snowballs from there.

By now most people heave heard of Florida's "Dont' Say Gay" law. You can find more information about what this all entails at Human Rights Watch. Laws like this are so detrimental to the children we serve. Are we just supposed to pretend LGBTQIA+ people do not exist, even within our own classrooms? If so, what does that teach those children? That they don't matter? Their identity is not important? How many more children are we willing to lose, kids who kill themselves because to them it is the best solution for what they are going through?

Aside from that fuckery, we have agitators calling for book bans in school libraries - often books that those calling for such bans have not even read. Yet they attend school board meetings, railing against books they call pornographic, declaring teachers to be pedophiles for giving students access to them. Upon hearing such words as porngraphic or pedophile, it is easy for others to quickly be up in arms, without bothering to find out if this is actually true or not.

This book contains essays from across the educational spectrum - from elementary to high school - art teachers, social studies teachers, principals, and librarians at all three levels. Their experiences range from disheartening to traumatizing. Their jobs and lives are threatened, they're doxxed, called groomers, put on leave, or fired - all because they dared to make their spaces welcoming for ALL students, or because they dared to teach historically accurate information.

In one case, it was not even anything that happened in the classroom, but perception that a teacher was not 'feminine enough' in their dress; the teacher also used they/them pronouns, and the non-binary Mx instead of Ms. Less than a week into the school year, parents in their school district found their Insta account that showed various art projects they'd completed during their college coursework and proceeded to insist the work promotoed pedophilia (images were actually charcoal work showing nude ADULT models) and suicidal ideation (because of a performance piece that involved a plastic bag NEAR their face. The teacher was placed on leave four days into the new year and eventually signed a separation agreement that came with fantastic letters of reference. So this teacher, who could have been a candidate for Teacher of the Year, was run out of the district because some parents did not like how they looked. That is what this all boils down to, and it is disgusting. Not once did this teacher discuss their appearance, gender roles, or anything related to those topics in their classroom. They were hired to teach art to pr-k through 4th grade, and that is what they did. Yet they lost their job, ultimately because they looked different than all the other teachers on campus.

Something the book does well, aside from sharing a wide variety of ways teachers and school librarians have come under attack is to share a timeline of just such events. It begins in the period of 1865-1877 during Reconstruction in the South after the Civil War. Communism, the "Lavender Scare", Brown v. Board of Education, school vouchers, and so many more court cases come up, several commissions, and then specific events that target public education directly are all outlined. It is eye-opening to see that this is nothing new, but this round is the most dangerous given the speed with which misinformation spreads thanks to social media and those purposely agitating with false info.

An unfortunate theme that emerges here is that of passive admins who don't support their teachers because they don't want to upset the parents, or lose their own jobs. The teachers sharing their stories here all experienced this in some form, from admins to basically giving in, to those outright hostile to them. Some also spoke of lack of support from colleagues who did not want to get involved, for fear of being placed on leave or being fired as well.

It is little wonder then, that these educators also spoke of the debilitating mental, emotional, and physical effects on their health as they struggled to understand how doing their jobs, or simply existing, was cause to get them removed from a profession they had once loved so much. These are qualified educators, some of whom had been in their positions for several years with zero issues before. Along with often being forced out of their jobs or being moved to other teaching positions, these educators reported an increase in feeling unmanageable amounts of stress/anxiety, depression, panic attacks, weight loss or gain, insomnia, panic attacks, and more.

Another thing I loved about this book was hearing from the educators themselves. Here, they control their own stories and share the impact from start to finish, both on their careers and themselves, with no chance for the media to distort or deceived (always looking at you in general, Faux News). I think this is crucial in order for people to understand just how massive these problems are, and how widespread this is becoming. For the 14 stories shared here, I can guarantee there are hundreds more we may never hear about.

This book is a must-read for everyone who sees where this road leads. I also highly encourage you to check out the website Censorville for videos from the teachers themselves (or those with actors portraying them), more information about the book, resources, and so much more.

Highly highly recommended.