The great Texas fart fuss

by David Benjamin 

“Several of the books in question in Llano County have L.G.B.T.Q. themes or characters, or addressed racial inequality, but they also include goofy children’s titles, such as a series of picture books about flatulence.”

—N.Y.Times, 13 April

 

PARIS—Sometimes, I think Congress decided to annex Texas to the USA for the sake of comic relief. Whenever some crackpot notion leaks into the country’s political consciousness, the great minds of the Lone Star State giddyup to the forefront of absurdity, rendering a dubious topic so laughable that only a drunk cowboy or Ted Cruz could possibly take it seriously.

So, we had the commissioners of Llano County (Deer Capital of Texas), proposing to shut down all its libraries. The commissioners were considering this frontal assault on literacy because a few parents objected to a dozen-odd books, including Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents and Dawn McMillan’s I Need a New Butt! The latter book is apparently a juvenile book about farting (a major juvenile talking-point). 

The righteous moms and dads also found heresy in a book that refers to the terrorists of the Ku Klux Klan as “terrorists.” This beef helps clarify the current “parents rights” movement, which boils down not to what kids should learn in school (or anywhere) but what kids should not be allowed to learn, although they’re gonna learn it all, anyway—if only because grownups don’t want them to. 

All this fuss shines a light on what is perhaps the first principle of public education feasible, the duty of schools to act in loco parentis, as trusted oases where teachers, for a few hours a day, enlighten, discipline, nurture—and even feed—children on their parents’ behalf.

Without faith in the school’s commitment to serve in loco parentis, school would be impossible. Harking on traditions older than our republic, the right wing has always understood, resented and opposed this basic truth. For most of the world’s social history, education was deemed a privilege reserved to the wealthy, the elite, the propertied, the aristocratic and the male. Extending literacy and pedagogy to the underclass and the ethnic unwashed was anathema to conservatives whose conservatism dwelt on the conservation of their power. 

Since public education took hold in America—and then spread globally like Covid-19—conservatives have marshaled an arsenal of tactics to meddle in schools and frustrate their mission. Public schools have nevertheless survived, even flourished, because they act in loco parentis. 

Public schools get kids out of the house—safely—and spare parents the job of teaching kids stuff they either don’t know themselves, or don’t know how to teach. 

“Dad, how do I figure out the square root of 13?”

“Mom, how do I use a mitre box to make a picture frame?”

The vast majority of parents happily consign their kids to the tender mercies of K-12 without a second thought. They need not ponder the aggravation, for just one or two children, of designing a curriculum, reviewing materials, developing daily lesson plans in ten, twenty subjects, scheduling classes and recesses and lunch and extracurricular activities. Public schools don’t undertake this chore for one or two kids, but for dozens, hundreds, thousands of restless—often reluctant—students whose range of aptitudes and interests cover an inconceivable vastness.

Most people understand how all-consuming it would be to home-school one’s children, especially since every parent nowadays puts in a forty-hour week. Thanks to school, parents are relieved, 180 days a year for twelve years, of child care. They are spared the difficulty of teaching the multiplication tables, touch-typing and Lord of the Flies. Most parents are grateful enough for this relief, and sufficiently humble, to leave the teaching of most subjects to the professionals, especially since the professionals—compared to lawyers, doctors, bankers, engineers, etc.—come so cheap.

The current effort by an ideological handful to claim their ill-defined “parental rights” is a social re-run. Book-banning and public piousness have a history that goes back to our Puritan forebears. Never have these movements focused empirically on “protecting” children from malign influences and bad books. 

(Rule of thumb: You know a book is bad because nobody ever reads it.)

The issue in Llano County is control, but not controlling children. Look closely and you’ll see a political minority—often not even local—exploiting public education as a wedge to attain and assert power, regardless of the wishes of most parents.

Spasms of anti-intellectual rage by small, aberrant factions are possible, again, because teachers, serving in loco parentis, give all those normal parents a blessed break. By trusting schools to be responsible stewards of their children, parents receive the right, without guilt, to ignore their kids at school, and simultaneously, to ignore school. They read report cards. Some attend parent-teacher meetings. They go to football games and attend the Christmas pageant. But the nuts and bolts of public education, the shifting trends in curriculum, the phonics debate, the balance between STEM and the humanities, the new math, the old math, all that stuff, parents leave to Mr. Chips while they make a living for their families.

Most parents also understand a reality that right-wing activists would prefer, above all, that nobody ever mentions.

Kids already know this shit.

Kids not only fart. They talk about farting and they compare farts. They find out about gay people and transgender kids from their gay classmates and transgender neighbors, or cousins, or TV hosts. They know about sex, from one another, from eavesdropping on parents and from books that might be in the library but probably aren’t. They mostly pick up on sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll—on their phones—from the ubiquitous and unavoidable internet. They know, long before I ever did when I was a kid, what goes where and how, and where else you can put it—and why you might want to.

It isn’t just the schoolhouse on the corner, and the public library, the Little League coach and Miss Mitzi’s dance studio who act in loco parentis. Porn does, too. 

No parent has ever successfully “protected” a curious kid from his or her inquisitiveness. Kids find out. It’s possible, of course, to kill curiosity. Religion does this well. Each reactionary movement ever conceived has been undergirded by preachers, spellbinders, cult figures and sacred doctrine. When the book-ban crowd wails about “indoctrination,” they’re singing from their own hymnal. It isn’t a coincidence that Donald Trump, messiah of America’s “religious right,” once said, “I love the poorly educated.” Nor is it surprising that whenever ultra-conservative Muslims seize power somewhere, they banish girls from school, burn books, censor the internet, expurgate history and put teachers in prison. 

Llano County won’t close its library. The commissioners are already backing down. The fart books will probably be saved. The latest book-banning movement will start to fade—as soon as Ron DeSantis over in Florida finds another dead horse to flog. 

Teachers will go on being underpaid, for a job too thankless for most people to even contemplate. Kids will still find education wherever they can, mostly not in school. And sensible parents will heave a sigh of relief and ask no questions when the day after Labor Day rolls around and somebody else takes charge of the kids.