
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, April 19, 1993                   TAG: 9304190247
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCH
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

SELF-CENSORSHIP

FROM TIME to time I'm invited to speak to public-school classes. Most often the topic is "Careers in Writing" or "What a Writer's Life Is Like." I accept these invitations whenever I can; I would have loved to have met - or even to have seen - a writer back when I was in school and dreaming of becoming one.

My most recent invitation came from a sixth-grade class in Roanoke County. "Tell us the different kinds of writing that you've done," the teacher suggested. "We've been reading some of your columns and want to know where you get your ideas. And bring something else to read, too. Maybe one of your stories."

I gathered some notes toward answering her first requests, and then began shuffling through my work to decide what to read.

Now, apart from this column, my body of published work is small: a couple of stories, a couple of essays. But I'm proud of it. I think it demonstrates reasonably high literary qualities; and I think it accurately reflects my politics and morals, which aren't base.

Nevertheless, I couldn't find a word among my published works that I felt comfortable reading in a public classroom. Not in a part of the county where parents have recently lambasted approved family-life curriculum materials.

I couldn't find a word that didn't remind me that teachers and librarians throughout Southwest Virginia have faced public outrage, even public threats, for presenting literature deemed "feminist," "liberal," "godless" or "immoral."

For, while I'm neither godless nor immoral, I'm certainly feminist and usually liberal, and my work reflects this. If I read from this story, what will the students take home to their parents? If I read from that essay, what will they report? If I'm personally challenged, can I stand up to it?

Finally, I'm ashamed to admit, I bowed to fear. I censored myself. Fearing public censure, I read from unpublished - and admittedly namby-pamby, second-rate - work.

I doubt the students even noticed what they missed. But that's the real tragedy, isn't it? That they were offered second-rate, namby-pamby literature simply because the threat of censorship exists.

They're being offered second-rate, namby-pamby history, science, hygiene and social studies, too, for the very same reasons.

I was in the classroom for scarcely two hours; even if a parent had complained, I'd not have lost my job, or even my free lunch period. And still the prevailing atmosphere of suspicion and intolerance cut me off at the knees. How must it affect teachers who work in this miasma daily? It seems to me that for them, self-censorship must grow into a habit so ingrained, so second nature that they scarcely even notice what they're doing any more.

Ideas are not dangerous. Words are not dangerous. Actions are dangerous. And self-censorship, like mine in that sixth-grade classroom, is an action.

How can we expect genuine teaching to take place if our teachers are afraid not to stop themselves and their students from challenging "conventional wisdom"? If they pull back from the difficult, not-so-pat positions? If they shy from the exotic, the unusual, the minority viewpoint?

Teachers who, out of a need for self-preservation, have been forced to develop keen self-censorship skills are no longer teachers; they're indoctrinators. And that, too, is dangerous.

Monty S. Leitch is a Roanoke Times & World-News columnist.

by CNB