Information is Treachery: Censorship in American Schools
Between local pressure groups and press-hungry politicians, academic liberty is under serious threat in many states.
I live in a place where censorship is threaded into the fabric of life. There’s likely no need to tell you about information control in the People’s Republic of China, about that electronic snare that’s always getting tighter. Censorship is almost a tradition here, going back over two millennia to the First Emperor and his campaign to wipe out every school of thought that challenged his rule.
By contrast, I grew up in a place where everyone assured me that we didn’t believe in that sort of thing. Book burnings and heretic hunts were presented as parts of a primitive past, things we only remembered that we could avoid them in the future. Modern Americans just don’t accept that kind of thing.
Yet here we are, with the majority of the states now considering bills restricting academic speech in one way or another. Book bannings are back in vogue, while demagogues hastily scratch out bills to stop an ever-growing list of boogeymen. And what was once the domain of independent cranks whose ability to cause harm was limited to their local school districts, this new campaign is increasingly organized and…
