Times Editorial : Next step
Posted on Friday, August 26, 2005
Something of worth recently took place at the Fayetteville Public Library. Specifically, the policy regarding a challenge of library materials found itself somewhat altered. Generally speaking, polices on the Reconsideration of Library Materials were determined to be "lacking in several key areas."And so, revisions were made. According to the new policy, staff will have the opportunity to talk to residents about the material in question and suggest alternative reading materials. If that proves unsatisfactory, a written form can be submitted to the assistant director requesting that the text be pulled. From there, a committee and finally the board of trustees could be called in for a decision. Question: Is it possible these revisions were spurred to life by the actions of Laurie Taylor, the vocal critic of Fayetteville School District libraries who has managed to cause a passionate debate in Fayetteville regarding explicit texts? Hers is a push to get the school district to develop a more parentoriented system to determine which texts should be within reach of the curious eyes of young people, and which should not.
Regardless, it's clear that a public library needs a delineated policy describing how challenges to books and other materials will be handled. In light of the current controversy with the school system, it probably would be wise for the school board to also deliberate a bit on whether policy changes are needed to address the concerns that obviously go beyond Laurie Taylor.
Beyond that, it needs to be clear that a public library - one that holds the responsibility to be a depository of vast amounts of knowledge available for information-seekers of all types - needs very different standards for successfully challenging materials than public school libraries. At the Fayetteville Public Library, the exclusionary ceiling ought to be almost out of reach.
With a public library, everyone knows going in that anything and everything might be on the shelves, and parental guidance must come from, of all places, the parent. Just as in a university setting, public libraries must be left alone to practice their own form of academic freedom, becoming repositories of all sorts of information that would in some cases undoubtedly offend someone. So, even though it's a smart idea to have a formalized challenge process in place, any community that wants a successful and meaningful public library must be open to the full range of text and pictures that might be found on their shelves. Even with this policy change, our hope is that the Fayetteville Public Library remains what it must be: a full and open font of knowledge. For it to be anything less would be an affront to the concept of freedom of thought that is so basic to this nation's core.
• • • Speaking of the drive to create a parental guidance system in the public school libraries, we were intrigued to learn the other day that technology might exist that would allow parents to "flag"any books they did not want their child to check out. If that child tried, the computer would notify the librarian of the restriction and the book would not be handed over to the child.
That would certainly seem to fit under the category of allowing each parent to be a parent to their own child, a concept Taylor and others have certainly advanced as central to their cause. They say they don't want to tell other parents how to raise their children, but only want to have control over their own kids.
Maybe there is hope for a resolution in such technology.
What's clear is that the school district administration's slower-than-Christmas approach - handling only one complaint at a time, resolving it before allowing another complaint to be filed - is not designed to be a real solution. It, and the superintendent's insistence that Taylor only communicate with him via letters rather than e-mail, will only frustrate and prolong this clash of educational values when it needs to be resolved in some more long-term fashion.
The school board must discern a way that parental concerns can be taken seriously without reducing any parent wanting to be involved in their children's upbringing to being perceived as a fringe element. Last we checked, such parental involvement was a good thing.
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