It Breaks My Heart Headline in Education Week October 1, 2014: “Pentagon Program Provides Surplus Weapons to Districts.” Two weeks ago I returned to the small, rural elementary school where I held my first job as principal to attend a ribbon cutting for a wonderful new addition allowing the school to expand its offerings across the board. Over 30 years ago the only surplus we received was office supplies and occasional special programs of paperback books or colored markers. Security at the school was the evening custodians remembering to lock the three entrances. Threats came in the form of a local bull who’d wandered onto the playground one morning during recess. (His owner, an eighth grade girl named Ann, calmly put her finger through his nose ring and led him home, but not until after some apparently entertaining, misguided heroics on my part.) Back then the only uniforms on our campus were for sports teams and the occasional volunteers during Fire Prevention Week. Since those days, I spent another 15 years intermittently in different districts into the first decade of this century, so I know the changes. I vividly recall the first time my life was threatened by an angry teenager, the one time a parent arrived in my office with a pistol in his shoulder holster (it remained there), the time we had the full state police bomb squad investigating an unusual package discovered at the main entrance, the early and unusually warm spring morning I spent watching our baseball teams practice after I’d seen the reports from Columbine. I’ve seen the changes, and that headline breaks my heart.

Banned Books I was delighted to realize that on a lengthy list of commonly banned books I have read all but two, and taught two during my years as an English teacher. What is there about that sense of pride, I wonder. I’ve never been what anyone would consider a rebel. For instance, thanks to Facebook I was reminded that I wore a blue/gray suit with a navy tie in my fourth grade class picture. Perhaps that outlandish choice was in some inverted way a device for stepping outside the fashion norms for nine-year-olds of 1963. Regardless, no one ever called me James Dean. Suits and ties notwithstanding, one aspect of my early years did influence my interest in a wide range of literature. My mother had books all over the house. My father’s contribution was having made the floor-to-ceiling bookshelf in the living room. Mom’s Book-of-the-Month-Club membership brought a seemingly endless supply of new, hardcover treasures full of promising adventure, some years ahead of my own time, which I suppose made for even more adventure than the author’s might have imagined. Imagination, the intersection of the author’s and the reader’s, is the point of literature. Imagination can be frightening, whether or our own creation late at night reading to the accompaniment of a howling wind, or the deliberate manipulation of a writer deftly pushing largely untapped, little used buttons of deep-seated anxieties and fears commonly held and personally abraded. Maybe that’s it. Books are banned because of fear. Topics, beliefs, convictions that confront us, that rub us even further than the exposed nerve endings of personal experience can create fear. Too often fear of ideas can result in bonfires; just ask Guy Montag.