In the fifth episode of our new series, Teacher Speech and the New Divide, we’re taking a look at book bans in schools. We head off to Florida, the epicenter of this conflict, to find out more about what books are being removed, how this affects students, teachers, and the community, and the actions that educators are taking in the face of these controversial transformations in school libraries and classrooms. Our host Justin Reich is joined by former teacher and educational researcher Natasha Esteves, and accompanied by an interview with Brevard County teacher and founder of Foundation 451, Adam Tritt. Special thanks to our friends at Learning for Justice, and the Justice in Schools team at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for their collaboration on this work.
In the fifth episode of our new series, Teacher Speech and the New Divide, we’re taking a look at book bans in schools. We head off to Florida, the epicenter of this conflict, to find out more about what books are being removed, how this affects students, teachers, and the community, and the actions that educators are taking in the face of these controversial transformations in school libraries and classrooms. Our host Justin Reich is joined by former teacher and educational researcher Natasha Esteves, and accompanied by an interview with Brevard County teacher and founder of Foundation 451, Adam Tritt.
Special thanks to our friends at Learning for Justice, and the Justice in Schools team at the Harvard Graduate School of Education for their collaboration on this work.
Resources and Links
Learn more about Foundation 451
Take our course on supporting youth activism at www.youthinfront.org
Pre-Order Justin Reich’s new book Iterate: The Secret to Innovation in Schools
Watch our documentary film We Have to Do Something Different
Transcript
https://teachlabpodcast.simplecast.com/episodes/teacher-speech-e5/transcript
Credits
Host Justin Reich
Produced by Aimee Corrigan and Garrett Beazley
Recorded and Mixed by Garrett Beazley
Follow TeachLab on Twitter and YouTube
Adam Tritt: I pulled out Vonnegut's letter 1973 to the Drake County South Dakota School Board when they were putting his book Slaughterhouse Five into the furnace. Putting it in the furnace. It starts out, "Sir, I am very real and I'm offended." And we compared that to one of his commencement addresses. Look here you can see the styles are the same, though the tone is vastly different and no sooner had I done that, then I get an email stating that the Slaughterhouse Five and Kite Runner must come immediately off of my shelves.
Justin Reich: From the MIT studios of the Teaching Systems Lab, I'm Justin Reich and this is TeachLab, a podcast about the art and craft of teaching. Welcome back to our series on teacher speech and the new divide. This is the fifth episode. If you haven't heard the first four episodes, be sure to go back and take a listen. Florida, the epicenter of divisive concept laws. Today we're headed to Florida to look at the way that these laws are impacting real classroom teachers there and the actions that educators are taking in the face of those laws. To help us understand the current landscape, we've brought in a very special friend of the Teaching Systems Lab. We're super lucky today to have our TeachLab Florida correspondent Natasha Esteves in the studio with us from Florida. She's a former social studies teacher, a former educational researcher in the Teaching Systems Lab. Natasha, thanks for joining us.
Natasha Esteves: Thank you so much for having me Justin. It's good to be talking to you again.
Justin Reich: So Natasha, just down the street from where you live in Miami is and where you were a product of the Miami Dade Public Schools. There was a school where a parent challenged Amanda Gorman's book The Hill We Climb in the school library. Tell us about that story.
Natasha Esteves: Okay, so one day I'm on cnn.com or New York Times, I'm just reviewing the headlines for the day and I come across the headline about Amanda Gorman's book, the Hill We Climb, which is a poem she read at President Biden's inauguration being challenged at a school in Miami-Dade County Public Schools. I was like, "Oh, that's really close to home." Then I opened the article and I immediately recognized the name of the town and the name of the school as my town and the school down the street from me. Basically, I wanted to know what's going on, how did this happen, what's the process for challenging Amanda Gorman's book and why was it even challenged in the first place? I got access to the forms that the parent filled out and what I learned was that there's a one-page form with a couple of questions called Request for Reconsideration of Media.
The parent filled out that for five books, including Gorman's poem, the form was incomplete. It lacked evidence for a lot of the parents' claims. For example, the parent claimed that Gorman's book had indirect hate messages, but yet that incomplete form with very little evidence still jump started this process in the school and the district where people and time and space was all set aside to seriously consider removing this and other books. The details of the outcome remained a bit murky when this became a national headline. There a lot of contradicting information, but what really struck me was just how easy one parent can challenge one book.
DeSantis and the Florida Department of Education, they maintain that these instances having a book challenged and removed or moved to a different part of a library, they're not bans necessarily, but Amanda Gorman herself did see any kind of consideration of removing her book, any kind of moving it around in a library as a form of banning because access might be restricted or some fear might be instilled in accessing her book. For me, like I said, what's really interesting is how easily a book like Amanda Gorman's poem can be challenged with little evidence and little information and how much time and labor and space and energy is set aside when one parent has a problem with one book.
Justin Reich: And sometimes these book bans happen with books that are not super popular, which people maybe haven't read or other things like that. What's so striking about this is Amanda Gorman's poem was read in an inauguration. It was designed for public consumption by people of all ages. To some extent, an inauguration is meant to be a kind of [inaudible 00:04:32] experience, is meant to be something completely non-controversial. Labeling this poem, designed to be non-controversial, as controversial was striking at the time and it remains striking now.
Natasha Esteves: The poem, this book and other books that were challenged in a different news article when the parent was interviewed, the parent shared that she's not really a book person I know. There's a bit of admission there that this parent may not have read the book she has challenged. It seems to me that this is a little bit less about the content of the book and a little bit more about some reactions to conversations that may be happening in certain parent circles.
Justin Reich: Natasha, zoom out for us. What is the landscape for K-12 teachers in Florida? What are the bills? What are their names? What is it that that's on teacher's mind and impacting their practice?
Natasha Esteves: This administration has been prolific and there have been many bills that just went through the legislative process with immense speed, were signed into law, have already been challenged in court and everything's happening really fast. I think the most relevant ones to our conversation today might be HB-1557, which is officially called the Parental Rights in Education Act. This is already law as of July 1st, 2022. It's most commonly referred to as the Don't Say Gay Bill. The other very popular bill that has already been signed into law and has been challenged in court is HB-7, which is the Stop Woke Act, more officially known as the Individual Freedoms Act. Finally, there's a bill that targets the curriculum a little bit more specifically and definitely impacts not just teachers but media specialists, and that's the curriculum transparency bill HB-1467.
This isn't all of it, but these are three that have been in the news a lot. The Don't Say Gay Bill, Parental Rights in Education Act, has very vague language that calls for a restriction or actually prohibiting classroom discussion. This is verbatim from the language of the bill. Prohibiting classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity in certain grade levels or in a specified manner. It's not exactly clear what they mean by specified manner. It's not exactly clear what they mean by classroom instruction. Are these official lessons? Are these side conversations teachers may have with their students and anybody who's worked with high school students knows that when you build a relationship with kids, kids will bring some of their personal issues to you or may ask for advice or guidance, who knows? It's not exactly clear to what extent teacher's speech in the classroom falls under this bill. Again, if it's official classroom instruction or any conversation teachers have with any student.
The bill also mentions classroom instruction specifically happening by school officials or a third party. That means that if a teacher wanted to bring an outside speaker or there's an afterschool club and maybe there's somebody virtually joining into a conversation, and when I was in high school, we had a gay-straight alliance, I think it's called something else now. Third parties speaking at a school club or in a classroom setting are also prohibited from discussing sexual orientation or gender identity in kindergarten through grade three.
However, Justin, this has since been expanded to K through 12th grade. The discussions can not happen in a way that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate. The problem is this is never defined. Right? We don't know what falls under their classroom instruction. We don't know what is meant by the folks who wrote this law by age appropriate or developmentally appropriate. These are arguably subjective things, and I think that it's vague on purpose. This allows a parent, a district in the state to raise red flags or bring up an issue as long as they perceive a book, a classroom material, a lesson to be not age appropriate, not developmentally appropriate. Sure enough, the Florida Department of Education has a page on their website for parents to submit complaints about harmful or pornographic or material that isn't age appropriate on their website directly. There's just very, very little detail on the parameters to decide what is and isn't. Okay.
Justin Reich: What has this led to for teachers?
Natasha Esteves: It's led to a lot of fear and it's led to a lot of misinformation and reaction. We have folks saying like, "Oh my goodness, you're going to get a felony." I'm not sure, I don't know that that's true because the law doesn't really talk about punishment for being in violation of it, but it has created a scenario in which schools and districts that are fearful of repercussions are trying to evaluate or vet every single book that they have in these libraries or in classroom libraries. It's a lengthy process.
Justin Reich: Yeah, no, one of the things about it increasing the possibilities of challenging parts of the educational system, which to some extent is good. It probably makes sense that there's some role that the community should play in reviewing the resources that schools use or conversations schools are having. If you ask for increased transparency without finding ways to pay for the costs of that evaluation or that other kind of work, then you're taking time away from instruction. You suggested that we talk to a teacher named Adam Tritt. Tell us about Adam.
Natasha Esteves: All right, so Adam Tritt is an English language arts teacher in Brevard County, Florida. He was directly impacted by the legislation we discussed earlier and when books that he usually teaches in his class started being banned from his school, he took matters into his own hands and decided to start donating those books for free out of a Ben and Jerry's in his town. This effort turned into something bigger. He founded an organization called Foundation 451, and through this new nonprofit he has folks from all over the country donate money to him. He uses his money to buy all these banned books and through faires all over the state of Florida, he donates them for free.
Justin Reich: We had a chance to sit down with Adam Trent and learn about his experiences in the classroom in the wake of Florida's latest divisive concept laws.
Adam Tritt: They are written in a vague fashion purposely. It makes blaming teachers easy. It makes firing teachers easy. Don't Say Gay law has been very hard to not step over the line with because it is so broad. What can you say? What can you not say? Can you mention someone's sexual orientation. Can I have of a picture of my wife? Can I have a picture of my husband on my desk like any normal human being would have in their workspace? What can I allow students to discuss and what may I not allow them to discuss? Where do I have to draw the lines? Can I bring it up? No. Can a student bring it up? Not really. It squashes discussion and it squashes debate in the classroom, thus it infringes upon my ability to teach critical thinking skills.
Natasha Esteves: Part of the issue is that there's a lot of conflicting information. There's a lot of misinformation coming from all sides, and it's really hard. This is why I started reading the language of the bills themselves. It's really hard to know right now what is and isn't legal. There's a lot of language that's very vague in the bills, and there's a disconnect sometimes between what the bills explicitly say, and a lot of these bills have been passed into law and the fears that people hold.
I do think that these fears are very valid though, because teachers have started to self-censor, are being affected, impacted by this fear in some way, shape, or form. Whether or not the fear is based on what's going on in these bills and these laws, whether or not it's justified, it does not matter. There's still this sort of chilling effect that's happening as a result of the conversations coming out of these bills. Yeah, there's two things going on here. There are the facts and then there are the fears that aren't always based on the facts, but I think they both matter. The facts matter because it tells you what you can and can't do, what is and isn't able to be litigated. Then the fear matters because it still has having an impact on teachers, students, and parents too for that matter.
Adam Tritt: Other laws regarding what books we can have in the classroom are equally vague in that different school systems have chosen to handle it in different ways, which just illustrates how vague the laws are. Some schools have simply removed anything that has been challenged. Some schools have sent the media specialist into vet classroom libraries, and I myself have had books by Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Malay removed. No one knows how to respond to this. As I said, the laws are so vague. We're doing the best we can.
Justin Reich: In the face of all this, there are a couple of specific moments inside the classroom that sparked Adam to take action outside the classroom.
Adam Tritt: There were two specific moments. One came after the other, one stoked the fires, and the second was the last straw. I guess we set a candle on fire. The first one was when I got an email through the Department of Education stating I need to turn over all of my materials that I use for my AEP English Language and Composition class to make sure they didn't run afoul of any of the state laws. I responded that I had been asking for textbooks for the past five years, and if they wanted, they were welcome to come to my classroom and go through all my filing cabinets and see everything that I've managed to cobble together. I sent that and never heard from them again.
Next week we're looking at Vonnegut. We're comparing letters. We're discussing tone and writing style, and I pulled out Vonnegut's letter 1973 to the Drake County South Dakota School Board when they were putting his book, Slaughterhouse Five, into the furnace [inaudible 00:15:09] in the furnace, and it starts out, "Sir, I am very real and I'm offended." We compared that to one of his commencement addresses. Look here, you can see the styles are the same, though the tone is vastly different. No sooner had I done that than I get an email stating that the Slaughterhouse Five and Kite Runner must come immediately off of my shelves.
Justin Reich: When I first heard that Slaughterhouse five was one of the book being challenged, there's something about a book that is older than you. If you're a middle-aged guy, there's something about a book that is older than you are being challenged, which is particularly striking. Part of why communities challenge books is because they shock. They shock our sensibilities. As things get older, they become more familiar. They seem from a more distant era, they lose some of their capacity to shock. But that certainly surprised me that a book that is about 10 years older than I am, that a book that's been challenged, banned, sometimes literally burned since 1975, was being banned still in Florida in 2022.
Adam Tritt: I came home and I said, I can't believe that I've got to pull Slaughterhouse Five off of my shelves. That's ridiculous. Of course, I fumed over this and then I continued to fume over this. I tend to dig my heels in. Unfortunately, my wife went away for the weekend and when she came back, I thought I was going to raise 500 bucks, like, I'm going to give these books out over the summer. I don't care. I'm going to stand somewhere. I'm going to give these books out. During the summer, I just kept Kite Rider and Slaughterhouse Five, I'm going to give these books out because I am who I am. I started a GoFundMe and $5,000 later, $10,000 later, now we have 181 different titles, multiple copies of course of each, and we go to varying events giving out these books.
Justin Reich: Natasha, what do you find so remarkable about Adam's activism?
Natasha Esteves: I was excited to see somebody taking action. Just so much of what I had been reading on the news, so much of what I'd been consuming in terms of what's going on in Florida had to do with this legislation and the bleak future that it seemed like was ahead of us all. Seeing somebody coming up with a solution, a very creative one, intrigued me. Since I've read about him, I've been looking to find others who are trying to operate outside of the system to ensure that students who deserve the freedom to learn and have a right to be exposed to a variety of viewpoints and ideas, get that to make sure that kids get that right. It seems like maybe they're not going to be able to get it in schools in formal learning spaces. Adam just struck me as somebody doing something really creative to make sure kids get access to ideas and books outside of the learning spaces where that's now being attacked and it's at a Ben and Jerry's. How cool is that?
Adam Tritt: What we have achieved so far is we've gotten over 4,179 books out to students and their families over multiple copies, over 181 titles over the course of the last year. We've also created six little free banned book libraries, usually outside churches across Florida as they're open to the public, so they're outside where you can drive up and pick a book, give a book. We've created those and we've created four inside teen safe spaces and reading libraries that concentrate on band books, two inside churches, one inside Ben and Jerry's, one inside a craft store, and we continued to create these.
Justin Reich: What started is Adam's fundraiser to buy a few books back in March of 2022 has grown into Foundation 451, a nonprofit distributing thousands of challenged and banned books to students and their families throughout Florida through partnerships with organizations like Ben and Jerry's and Little Free Libraries. Even in the face of threats, Adam has no plans to stop and sees donations in support of this work from around the country. We asked Adam to describe what we would see if we attended a Foundation 451 event in his community.
Adam Tritt: You would see a minimum of three large tables covered in books and they would be organized LGBTQ issues, racial Justice, social justice, and then there would be a Holocaust. Then we would have middle school books ranging up to a high school books. A section for classics. Then we have a nonfiction section and poetry section, and then we have usually two or three benches of picture books and early readers. These books are not just what's banned in Brevard County, not just what is banned in Florida, but what has been historically banned. What is challenged. Plus of course in Florida because of Stop Woke and Don't Say Gay, many books are banned even though they're not banned by title. Try teaching on the 1619 Project. You can't. We have 1619 Project.
Justin Reich: Young people have been profoundly affected by the banned books that Foundation 451 has given them. We asked Adam to share with us a few stories.
Adam Tritt: During the Caribbean Festival, a young black girl came over, picked up This Book Is Gay, someone walked over, table was empty of people. There was no one moving around. Someone comes over, she puts it down. This happened three, four times. Finally, she picked up the book next to it and left. She came back about 20 minutes later and she whispered, "Can I put this back and take this one?" And she picked up This Book Is Gay I said, "Of course, dear." And she just picked it up and cried. A parent came in with his wife, their son and their daughter. This is a trans child. They picked up What The T and the kid said, "I didn't realize that there were books about people like me." And they hugged their father and the father and the child cried together and thanked us.
Crank the book Crank, a novel in verse. Someone picks it up, puts it down. We get a lot of that, picks it up, puts it down. Someone else walks over, picks up the book, hands it to her and says, "This book saved my life." The person takes it and leaves. There are lots of times like that. Six year old, maybe seven year old, this was at a Ben and Jerry's event. Picks up the book Soul Way, walks over with her mother and looks at my wife and says, "Why is this book banned?" And Lisa looks at the kid, looks at her mother and says, "Because some people are racist, honey, and they don't want people to like who they are. Isn't that right, mama?" And Lisa and the mama just tears in both eyes and they left with a copy of Soul Way.
Justin Reich: A remarkable thing about Adam is it's not hard to imagine someone who says, "Man, the school system is really making some bad decisions here. I'm going to leave it and start a nonprofit that gives away banned books to kids." But the kind of amazing thing that Adam has done has said, I'm going to stay in the classroom as a teacher. I'm going to adhere to all the rules and responsibilities that I have as a teacher. I'm going to follow, I don't know if it's unionized. I'm going to follow all the union rules. I'm going to follow all these other guidelines, but outside of school, I'm going to be an activist and I'm going to be an activist working to give away the books that my school is banning, holding onto those dual roles as a government employee, as a community employee, and then as a activist and a community organizer. That's tricky work.
Adam Tritt: I spoke with my union about what the laws were and did my best to make sure that I am complying completely with what the laws are. Can you come to school, school board building and give out books like, "Oh, let me think about that. Hell no." No. Things like that. No, that's not a line. I'm not giving them the ammunition to fire me. They can go find it. I'm not handing it to them. Do I have an understanding where there could be conflicts? Yes. Have I crossed any lines? Probably. Have I done so on purpose? No. Is there plenty that I can do without crossing those lines? Oh goodness, yes. I continue to make myself as big a thorn in their side as I can without giving them an actual reason to fire me. I get complaints right to my face.
I have death threats. The FBI's on this, but anyway, coming up to me yelling at me. I'm a groomer, pedophile, and a Jew, so just for giving out copies of these books. I was like, "Well, the parents are here. The parents have chosen for them to have this book. Is this not what you wanted?" And as a nod to the state of Florida, because we wouldn't want to break the laws, at least not the spirit of the laws 16 and under, they have to have a parent with them. People come over with their families, there's great discussion about what's banned, why it's banned, what the laws are, how they're enforced, and a lot of, "You've got to be kidding me." And, "This book? Why? How are they supposed to learn to think?" What reading, running, arithmetic, what are they supposed to be reading then?
We have had great effect in our community. A third of my students don't have intranet access. I teach in a town that has exactly 0 bookstores, 130,000 people, no bookstores and spotty at best transit. You don't know what you don't know. We've given students access to things they didn't know. We've given students who need to know they have value, the understanding that they are not alone. We have helped students become non-isolated. We have helped students who had no voice find voices. We've helped students who could not be seen to be seen. When they could not speak for themselves, we spoke for them. That continues to be necessary.
If we've accomplished anything, it is that. If we've saved someone with the book Crank, that alone is enough. If one trans child feels that they are loved and cared for, that is enough. If one parent knows that their child no longer thinks they're the only person who's ever felt this way, that is enough. If we've done that, if we've just done one of those things in the past year, that's enough. What's on the horizon is we've had many, many people ask how to do this in their own communities. There's only so much we can do here. We want to help other people do exactly what we're doing.
Justin Reich: What, what's your sense so far about the impact that an organization like Foundation 451 can have in your state? Why is it relevant in your state? Why is it relevant to you?
Natasha Esteves: Well, I love that Foundation 4 51 exists and there are others like it because I hope that it shows folks that aren't in Florida that we're not going down without a fight. I think that there's this perception that the south and Florida is wacky. Florida man, Florida woman. Now look at everything that's going on in Florida when it comes to education, fights with Disney World and it's just very easy to make fun of. But I think what outsiders don't realize is that we're being negatively impacted by this legislation and by this climate, and we are pushing back. Some of us more than others. Adam I respect for having taking matters into his own hands and starting a nonprofit and giving away these band books. There's an organization called the Florida Freedom to Read Project that also came about since this, I think once Stop Woke Act was put into effect.
There are organizations that have already existed since before DeSantis like the Dream Defenders, and they continue to do things like Teach-in. What I think is cool about his foundation and others is that it can show folks all over the country that we have some scary things happening in terms of attacks and academic freedom and freedom of speech in general and freedom to learn here in Florida. But we have people resisting. These people deserve support and to have their voices and their efforts elevated and amplified. I think these individuals also give us a sense of where we will be able to exercise our freedom to teach and learn in the future if these attacks on public education keep happening. We might start seeing what's going on outside of formal learning spaces as a result of these attacks on education. I appreciate what Adam is doing so much and the work that he does is necessary and I will support it in any way that I can.
At the same time, I think it's worth mentioning that teachers shouldn't have to be activists. Right? It's unfortunate that Adam has to make sure that his students and students at large have access to these books by starting a nonprofit and giving away banned books outside of his teaching time, outside of his work time. At the same time, I think that not every teacher might feel safe or comfortable enough. I believe that teachers that belong to marginalized communities, including but not limited to black teachers, teachers that identify as LGBTQ might all feel possibly a little more hesitation to speak up in ways that Adam has.I don't know.
Sometimes having the time and bandwidth, the ability, even the courage to speak up, to be this vocal and this visible is a very special privilege and it is beautiful that Adam is doing what he's doing. I do hope that listeners realize that teachers have so much to do already. There's so much going on. Many teachers, I know this for a fact from the research I've done with you, Justin, were so stressed and overwhelmed during the pandemic and were so vilified and attacked by the public at large.
Justin Reich: Part of what is comforting is that there is some precedent in Supreme Court jurisprudence that protects the actions of teachers like Adam, that as the Supreme Court has said, "Teachers do not check their citizenship at the door when they walk into a school. They have protected First Amendment free expression rights outside of school and inside of school." There are ways that ideal has been chipped away to some extent. There's actually ways recently that it's been strengthened, particularly in terms of teacher's religious speech and religious expression. One thing that helps build confidence in Adam's efforts are that the courts have recognized that the First Amendment protects quite a bit of what Adam is doing, hopefully everything that Adam is doing.
The second thought that I have is that I'm incredibly grateful to Adam for his work in making books available to young people but it can't just be teachers that are standing up for books in public schools in this moment. It really is a moment that is going to require lots of citizens, those who are teachers and those who are not teachers, to really think hard about what we want public schools to be able to do. If we think really hard, whether we or not we want a beautiful poem read at the inauguration to be able to be accessible to every young person regardless of what grade they're in and if we think that Amanda Gorman's poetry should be widely accessible to young people, then we have to recognize this is a moment where we're going to have to organize for that, where we're going to have to fight for that, where we're going to have to campaign for that. Adam is certainly an inspiration to anybody who wants to see that free reading, free expression in the United States.
Natasha Esteves: I just wanted to share that the high school students that I reached out to, I asked them particularly about the Don't Say Gay Bill, the Parental Rights in Education Act, questions about whether some ideas or books should be banned or removed from classrooms. One student wrote to me, "I don't think so because books are important and if there are books surrounding that topic," the topic being anything surrounding LGBTQ issues, "it can be helpful to other students who are discovering themselves and help them learn more." This was a sophomore and the next one is a senior. "I don't understand why getting educated and learning about that stuff is wrong. It helps people understand themselves better and maybe inform others on why it's okay to be those things." And she was referring to folks who might identify as gay or straight or who may identify as trans.
The general impression I get with high school students I've spoken to is that they tend to be more open-minded than the folks behind this legislation. They are more curious, they are more accepting, and they have a hard time understanding why anything would be banned, why anything would be taken away from their learning experience.
Justin Reich: The Supreme Court tells us in Tinker that students and teachers don't leave their First Amendment rights when they walk through the schoolhouse door, but Adam has a real challenge ahead of him in balancing his activism about books being challenged with the complexities of being a classroom teacher in a school with challenged and banned books. We asked Adam to talk some more about those tensions.
Adam Tritt: Teachers get extremely mixed messages. Teach the curriculum. Okay, I can teach the curriculum. Be professional, you're supposed to be a mirror for the kids. Oh, so be a mirror for the kids, a mirror of who they are, or do you want me to be a blank canvas? It's different. I can't be a blank. You can't have 120 blank teachers. Kids won't care how much you know until they know how much you care. Okay. I see. How would you like me to show them that I care? By giving them books that show I understand who they are or by telling them that who they are doesn't matter? The decision making process for me is pretty easy because my soul and spirit are more important than the law.
Justin Reich: My soul and my spirit are more important than the law. It sounds like a line from Henry Thoreau's Civil Disobedience, "Under government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison." Maybe under a government which bans books unjustly, the true place for a great book is in the hands of a young person.
Adam Tritt: We are really headed toward a single story being told. We have decreased access to a broad range of ideas. Of course, I've been told that I am indoctrinating kids. Giving access to a broad range of ideas and teaching critical thinking skills is the opposite of indoctrination. Removal of ideas, narrowing the field of discussion and what is appropriate to ask or not ask, reducing inquiry, the art of inquiry to something that is narrowed to the point where is useful only for passing a standardized test. These words are being redefined and used as weapons. But, the less we are able to teach critical thinking skills and less people realize what is being done to the language. Several white boys have come up to me, "What good is it going to do to me only to read things by people like me?" And they understand that by reading stories of other people, we don't just learn how other people are, how other cultures work. We learn that it's okay to be different. But we also learn that we have so many similarities.
Once people realize that, we can celebrate our differences and realize that we're all just human beings. Most of the students want that. They really do. I tell them beginning of the year, especially in NAP, I want you at the end of this year to be to know the difference between information and propaganda. I want you to be able to tell when an argument is fallacious, whether it's a commercial on TV, whether it's an ad on the internet, whether it's something that you're not sure, "Is this satire or is this news?" Whether it's political. I just want you to be able to take it apart and know, because the basis of education in the United States was, has been, continues to be creating an electorate that is able to understand fact from fiction, a literate electorate as Jefferson put it. If we've done that, you can go out and say what you believe and back it up and vote how you want and know that you're making a choice based on facts. That's all I want from them.
Justin Reich: Natasha, any final thoughts today?
Natasha Esteves: I'd like your listeners to realize that just as Adam Tritt and other educators recognize the value that critical thinking is for students, that media literacy is for students. Lots of parents see that value too. To counter the force that is Moms for liberty here in the state of Florida, there are groups of parents like Moms for Libros in Miami that are organizing parents to stand up for their kids' education and their ideas that for our kids to become critical thinkers and civic actors in our democracy, they need a wide range of ideas to have access to. They want to be exposed to diverse authors, and they don't want their kids' education to be restricted or controlled by a small group of powerful parents. I think it's important to realize that activism matters. That what happens outside of formal learning space, like what Adam Tritt is doing matters in that some of these groups are very well funded and very organized, and those that are countering them are increasingly well funded and organized too. All of that, Adam Tritt, Moms for Libros, give me hope that we're going to be okay here in Florida.
Justin Reich: That's great. Natasha Esteves, our Florida TeachLab podcast correspondent, thanks so much for joining us.
Natasha Esteves: Thank you so much for having me, Justin. It was such an honor
Justin Reich: Adam's story giving away a few books, then a few more, building some partnerships, raising some funds, starting an organization, building a response as citizens, to challenge restricted and banned books, it reminds me of the words of Henry Thoreau in Civil Disobedience, "For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be, what is once well done, is done forever."
I'm Justin Reich. Thanks for listening to TeachLab. Special thanks to our guests, Natasha Esteves and Adam Tritt. To learn more about the work of Foundation 451 visit Foundation 451, the numbers 451, foundation451.org. Next week we'll travel to Guilford, Connecticut to hear about one school district's approach to challenges in the face of controversial issues. Be sure to listen. In the meantime, we've got some great resources out there and forthcoming for Educators Everywhere. I've got a new book coming out in September. Iterate The Secret to Innovation in Schools. You can learn more at iteratebook.com. If you pre-order the book. You send along your order number, a little bit of information. I'll send you a signed book plate that you can put in your book, and you can register for a free online course in October about innovation in schools. It's all explained at iteratebook.com.
We've got another course that's running right now with our partners at Learning for Justice called Youth in Front about supporting student activism. You can visit youthinfront.org to learn more and check that out. Then you can see our documentary film. We have to do something different teachers on the journey towards more equitable schools at somethingdifferentfilm.com. You can find links to all this stuff in our show notes. If you like what you hear on TeachLab, be sure to leave us a rating or review wherever you listen to your podcasts. This episode was produced by Aimee Corrigan and Garrett Beazley. The sound was mixed by Garrett Beazley. Stay safe until next time.