The American Civil Liberties Group of Minnesota and Education Minnesota filed separate lawsuits Monday against St. Francis Area Schools over a new book ban policy in the district that has expanded the number of books to be removed from its school libraries.
The district has been using the Florida-based website booklooks.org for book screening, rather than librarians or teachers. The ACLU says 46 books have been banned in the school district since the policy was enacted in December.
One of those books is “The Kite Runner,” a 2003 historical novel about a young boy growing up in Kabul, Afghanistan. The author, Khaled Hosseini, spoke to Tom Crann about the ban.
The following transcript has been edited lightly for length and clarity. Click the audio player above to hear the interview.
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You novel ‘The Kite Runner’ frequently shows up on lists of books banned by school districts. Why is it targeted?
There has been a gradual and deliberate merging of educational policy and partisan politics. The aim has been to target books that have provided diverse viewpoints, and certainly “The Kite Runner” does that.
Look, over the last 20 years, I have received stacks and stacks of letters from high school students who write to me in their own words about what reading “The Kite Runner” meant to them. I find such an enormous disconnect between the objections raised by the so-called concerned parents and the experience of the students who actually are reading the books.
What do the students tell you?
They tell me the book encouraged them to stand up to bullies, to defy intolerance. They tell me, the book’s de facto tagline “There is a way to be good again” inspired them to volunteer, to look inward, to mend broken ties.
They tell me “The Kite Runner” gave them a more nuanced and more compassionate perspective on Afghanistan and its people. And very often, in fact, almost always, students express at the end of the letter gratitude to the book for these new insights.
So to me, the notion that somehow “The Kite Runner” is harmful to students when their own response, and frankly, the response from their own teachers as well, is so overwhelmingly enthusiastic and positive is, frankly, quite bewildering.
All libraries have to make choices about what’s on their shelves. Shouldn’t school boards have a right to oversight that reflects a consensus among parents? Shouldn’t there be a mechanism for that?
Well, there are mechanisms, but we have to involve not just the parents. We cannot rely on the subjective opinions of parents, and we have to involve the people who are professionally trained: the educators and the librarians.
Look, I’m a parent myself. I’ve raised two children. And I understand the impulse to want to protect your children. There are mechanisms available to opt your children out of lessons that you find personally problematic, but you don’t get to make that decision for my children.
If you were standing in front of a school board meeting in St. Francis, what would you say?
I would say that we live in a democracy, maybe one that we have to fight for more than we used to, but we still live in a democracy and it’s essential in a democracy that students have the freedom to read and learn.
It’s essential that students are exposed to the free flow of ideas, to new and diverse voices that are both inside and outside of their communities, and it’s essential that students are encouraged to think critically about the challenges of sharing this often complicated and confusing world with fellow human beings who may not look or speak or think like they do.
Banning books like “The Kite Runner” doesn’t protect students at all. In fact, I’ve said this before. I think it betrays them. It robs our children and our students of something vital that we owe them as their parents and their instructors, which is the chance to broaden their human community, to foster empathy, to teach them to challenge their own preconceived ideas and to maybe take a step toward becoming a fuller and wiser version of their authentic selves.