Circling back to this now that I’ve finished reading the piece. What a load of crap!
Found this, uh, “enlightening” interview with the author. She sounds insufferable.
JMC's Elliott Drago sat down with JMC Academic Council Member Rita Koganzon. Dr. Koganzon teaches at the University of Houston.
jackmillercenter.org
“I wrote my book out of a personal interest in the problem of exercising authority over children in a liberal democracy. I always resented having it exercised over me in school, so I was, for an otherwise serious student, frequently in trouble. Most of my teachers seemed totally inept, and I didn’t see why they should wield any kind of power over me, so I invested a lot of effort in mostly absurd ploys to undermine them. But in college, I totally lost this impulse. I encountered for the first time a critical mass of teachers who seemed naturally authoritative – they were erudite and impressive and I wanted to be like them instead of to humiliate them.
My dissertation, which became my book, was an effort to understand this seeming contradiction in liberalism – on one hand, children are mostly fools like me, and need authority to reach adulthood successfully. But on the other, there are few resources in our political theory, which is grounded in equality and liberty, to justify such authority. So I looked to early modern educational theorists like Locke and Rousseau to see how they dealt with this problem in their arguments for new approaches to education suited to this new regime.“
……
“RK: In the article, I argue that the “right to read” (like most students’ rights, as it happens) is a mirage and a strategic invention by educators who wanted to evade parental and community oversight for their curricular choices – in this case, the books they selected for school curricula and school libraries. Appeals to the “right to read” have made our subsequent book removal and censorship debates impossible to resolve because they allow one side – mostly the side that wants to shelve controversial books that parents and boards disapprove of – to hide behind “student rights” instead of making the positive case for their selections and being accountable to the ordinary governance structure of schools for them.
These ordinary forms of democratic school governance – oversight by elected boards – have come to be maligned as censorship and “book banning,” which only empowers unelected and unrepresentative educators to govern local schools.”
