Is Our Children Learning Too Much?

Christopher Hooks:

The problem is not what information kids get. That cat’s out of the bag. It’s how we strengthen kids’ ability to sort through and contextualize the avalanche of information—good, bad, and weird—that they’re getting, not only about sex but about history and politics and culture. Right now, the debate we’re having is whether schools should even be allowed to talk about those topics. It remains to be seen whether this panic, like others in the past, will work in November, but it’s clearly gaining some traction. A recent Dallas Morning Newspoll of Texans of both political parties found that 47 percent of parents said they lacked confidence in school librarians to know what is appropriate material for children—although 65 percent reported they also lacked confidence in elected officials to figure that out.

It’s easy to sympathize with parents who are protective of the innocence of their children. But there’s never been a kid who has made it to adulthood unscathed. When I found X-rated material for the first time, it came from a source no one around me could have guessed: Disclosure, by Michael Crichton, who wrote adventure books such as Congo and Jurassic Park. In the middle of a pretty boring novel about a tech company, I stumbled upon a shockingly explicit sex scene that introduced me to some eyebrow-raising concepts in human anatomy—in the form of a misogynistic parable about a woman who entraps a man into a sexual harassment lawsuit out of spite. Recently I was curious, so I checked: even though Disclosure was not on Krause’s list of questionable books, every high school library catalog I searched around Texas listed a copy.