What they don’t want us to learn

by David Benjamin

“If they give you ruled paper, write the other way.”
— Monograph by Juan Ramon Jimenez, in Fahrenheit 451

MADISON, Wis. — The Manichean moms of America are up in arms again, raging at teachers to stop teaching stuff they’re not teaching. Like “socialism?” But let’s get around to that later.

I started reading books I wasn’t supposed to read when I was about nine years old. Exploring shelves in the Tomah Public Library not meant for a kid my age, I daringly checked out a book that had no pictures in it. It was called Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and it posed a much bigger challenge than, say, a Big Little Book about Mandrake the Magician. But I plunged into the ocean with Captain Nemo and emerged both unscathed and altered (although I damn near suffocated under the ice). My teacher at St. Mary’s, of course, wouldn’t accept my book report because Jules Verne was about eight years above my grade level. I re-read it every year after that.

I’d caught the bug. There was prose (and poetry) out there that grownups were trying to hide from me — and from all the other kids. The yoke of prohibition made me curious. I started reading Mad magazine, which was right under our parents’ noses, sitting on the magazine racks at Miller’s Drugs, and they had no idea what was in it. I bought a subscription.

By ninth grade, I began buying books, with my own money, that grownups didn’t want me to read and no teacher who valued her job would even think about mentioning in class. While I read the approved English Dept. reading list, — Romeo and Juliet, A Separate Peace, Silas Marner, etc. — I was carrying around copies of Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Alas, Babylon, Cat’s Cradle, Machiavelli and Catch-22. I was reading Aldous Huxley and listening to Dave Brubeck.

Partly, yes, because I was interested. Partly because I wasn’t supposed to.

One of my favorite freshman moments took place after a pop quiz in English class. I was hunched in the rear of the classroom, my quiz completed, reading and laughing, because in Catch-22, I had just encountered the clash among Clevenger, Popinjay and the bloated colonel. My teacher, Richard Swanson, noting my mirth and suspecting mischief between me and the girl in front of me, proceeded ominously in my direction. Halfway, he saw the book cover. Recognition dawned on his face, turning into a smile. He held up his hands surrenderingly, nodded a subtle approval and turned away. No one else noticed. I had just been blessed by an adult, for the first time in my life, for reading a book that children must not read.

And then, there was Phil Williams. We were in the auditorium, late in my freshman year, rehearsing a school production of Our Town. I’m not sure the moment was quite as dramatic as I recall it now, but I picture Phil — two years my senior — drawing from the hip pocket of his jeans a dog-eared pulp paperback whose cover depicted a kid, our age, holding a suitcase and entering a scene of blonde seduction and urban depravity. The image carried a warning: “This unusual book may shock you, will make you laugh, and may break your heart — but you will never forget it.”

I’d already heard — who hadn’t? — of The Catcher in the Rye. It was quietly banned in every library to which I had access. Grownups spoke of it in hushed tones of moral wrath and parental dread. Teachers dared not mention it, except in intimate tête-à-tête with an exceptional (and discreet) student.

“You should read this,” said Phil avuncularly. I read it, of course, bonding with Holden Caulfield despite the gaping gulf between his affluent, Freudian New York milieu and my feral destitution in the Midwest. Perhaps more important was that just reading Catcher in the Rye, carrying it around school, its cover visible to any disapproving eye, was a declaration of independence, a tiny rebellion that carried a message vital to any thinking teenager. I’m learning what you tell me to learn, I was saying. But there are more things in Heaven and earth than are not dreamt of in your curriculum. And I’m gonna find ’em.

By tenth grade, I was prowling bookstore row along State Street in Madison, consciously hunting for books that no school board on earth would ever approve. I studied the art of lethal dialog under Edward Albee, memorizing whole passages from The Zoo Story and puzzling over the vast, heartbreaking void in the bitter lives of George and Martha. I haunted the New Directions section at the University Co-op bookstore, where resided Sartre, Dylan Thomas, Kenneth Rexroth and Ferlinghetti. I bought every forbidden book I could afford and made judgments about literature as callow and impulsive as any tirade from Holden Caulfield. I decided, for example (with Truman Capote), that Jack Kerouac was mostly full of crap and that William Goldman was vastly unappreciated.

Goldman’s first novel, The Temple of Gold, has one of the great first lines ever composed: “My father was a stuffy man.” I bought the first DelRay paperback edition of The Princess Bride, in which all the “good parts” were printed in red ink.

I decided that my favorite Beat Poet was Gregory Corso based on a poem, “Marriage,” that I was too young to read or understand. It begins, wonderfully, “Should I get married? Should I be good?/ Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood?/ Don’t take her to movies but to cemeteries…”

While I was in high school, the school board in nearby Fort Atkinson stridently purged its library, its curriculum and its community of most of the forbidden authors I’d already read — Salinger, Orwell, Bradbury, Updike. They overlooked Sartre only because who, in Fort Atkinson, had ever heard of him? Shortly after the banned-book fuss made the news, I attended a game between a Madison school, Monona Grove, and Fort Atkinson High. The big-city kids mocked the prurient hayseeds from Fort with chants of “One, two, three, four, I read 1984!” and “Fee Fum Fo Fi, I read Catcher in the Rye.”

The secret, though, was that there were bright, defiant kids in Fort Atkinson — I was sure of it — who’d read ’em, too.

Still, in this century, the godly naifs who once banished To Kill a Mockingbird and who denied white kids the lyrical prose of James Baldwin and the illuminating rage of Malcolm X, are still chasing phantoms both classic and new, including something never taught in any public school anywhere called “critical race theory.” They’re also trying to keep kids away now from Maya Angelou, Huck Finn (again), Harry Potter and Haruki Murakami (Yeah, really?). Among their musical targets are Miley Cyrus, Brad Paisley, Kanye West and Bruce Springsteen (The Boss? Honest! I looked it up). The parochial mob of Manichean moms are ferocious about guarding school toilets and softball teams from the sweet, bewildered transgender kids who are just beginning to figure out what’s going on in their bodies.

The consequence of all this moralist panic never changes. Most kids, addicted to the text function on their phones, or surfing porn on a four-inch screen or busily slaughtering large-breasted cartoon zombies with 50-cal cartoon machine guns have no idea what their teachers are allowed to teach and not teach. They don’t care. They are the next generation of PTA book-burners. But there are kids — there are always kids — who see a fence and cannot resist the urge to climb over.

These often quiet rebels understand what came to me when I discovered the Tomah Public Library: What they teach us in school is a faintly rendered pencil sketch of all we’ll learn before we die. To create the finished painting requires tools and pigments, palettes, toxins, visions and nudes on stools that can’t be taught and won’t be taught — either because there isn’t room in the curriculum for all that wonder or because somebody just doesn’t want us to know.