Reading rights: Being there

This article originally appeared in the No. 35, fall/winter 1997 issue of Messenger Magazine, published by the Friends of the UW-Madison Libraries.

by Don Johnson

"They are always scary," comments Ginny Moore Kruse. "Each was alarming at the time. They never occurred on a day or during a week when there was adequate time for reflection or clarity of thought. There is no good time."

As a nationally recognized expert in responding to book challenges and as head of the Cooperative Children's Book Center, Kruse is often called upon to help respond to such challenges. In fact, two decades ago she created the CCBC Intellectual Freedom Service on campus as a response to those early experiences with book complaints. The CCBC is the School of Education's noncirculating library for the research and study of young people's literature, and it is considered one of the finest such facilities in the nation.

While a flotilla of teachers, librarians and citizens may swirl around one another in debate, Kruse maintains her calm in the eye of the storm. She has been a classroom teacher, a school librarian, a public librarian and a college teacher of children's literature. You might say she has seen it all.

When a book is challenged, a school's librarian or administrator can turn to the CCBC for assistance. Kruse and her colleagues quickly gather reviews and any other materials they can find about the book, all within a 24-hour response time.

The range of complaints is broad--profanity, sexuality, treatment of authority, sexism, racism, elements of realism.

"We have whole lists of categories into which complaints fall," she says.

Nevertheless, the definition of censorship is hard to nail down.

"There is no 'it' for what gets banned or 'who' asking to ban a book," Kruse says. "We have no single way to say this is censorship. Sooner or later, everyone working with materials for children will field a complaint of some kind or another."

Her first experiences with book challenges? "The Outsiders" by S.E. Hinton was targeted; another claimed that a book was sexist.

"These exemplify that complaints are not from just one side or the other," she notes. "We think of a kind of extremist or far right attempt to limit what kids have access to."

Organized efforts do have high visibility and often represent one end of the political spectrum. Kruse indicates that in the past decade people in public school settings have seen a rash of complainants claiming a book is not "Christian," something she had not seen before. A newly visible movement is the Family Friendly Library group, which espouses "traditional family values." Organized groups, however, are not the whole picture.

"There always has been and always will be a genuine desire to express one's own values. No matter how many major literary awards a book may have one, that citizen will probably never like that book," she says. "The people to convince are the people on the review committee."

Kruse has great faith in that review process and the importance of convincing citizens that the review process is fair, even if they disagree with the outcome. In some cases, the school board or library board might actually agree with the complaint.

Will she talk about the specifics of cases on which she has consulted?

"No. The CCBC staff are bound by the library ethic of confidentiality," she says. "We are not in a position to tell anyone else who called, why or which book[s] had been questioned."

She returns instead to the democratic principle in the process. Citing the visit of a German scholar interested in intellectual freedom in the United States, Kruse recalls the scholar's departing reaction.

"'This is amazing,' the scholar told me. 'People who are very, very angry about a book will take a piece of paper, write down what they feel and meet with a committee to discuss it. In Nazi Germany we were burying books.'"

"The hidden curriculum has been taught well," Kruse says, "Those little lessons about living in a democratic culture that children learn in the process of learning. It's all about being a community and living in a democratic culture. We really do believe that people can make up their own minds and most of us are able to live with that. It's really very exciting."

Postscript

Ginny Moore Kruse is the director of the Cooperative Children's Book Center on the UW-Madison campus. In addition to providing information about the best in children's and young adult literature, the CCBC operates Intellectual Freedom Services. The service provides a 24-hour response hotline for information about a children's or young adult book that has been challenged in a school or library setting. Since its founding 20 years ago, the service has documented 1,486 intellectual freedom requests.

Kruse's efforts and those of the CCBC have been recognized nationally. They are the winners of the 1997 Intellectual Freedom Award presented by the American Association of School Librarians and SIRS, Inc. Kruse was cited for dedicating "most of her professional career to the mission of promoting intellectual freedom in a positive way by dealing with issues before the censors strike."

Kruse has served on the American Library Association's Intellectual Freedom Committee, as well as on the board of trustees of the Freedom to Read Foundation. In addition, she has chaired many literature award committees including the prestigious Newbery, Caldecott and Batchelder awards.