That was all we had back then. Every school had a copy of those six books, and what a wave of nostalgia it was to see them all again stacked up on the Oklahoma superintendent’s personal shelf.
Technically, back when I was in school, it was seven books. The seventh book in Oklahoma schools was “The Scouting Way,” by former Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert and other writers. It was a book that promoted the Boy Scouts and the values of the Boy Scouts to Boy Scout-aged children, but Oklahoma schools removed every copy back in 2016 for reasons that were never quite spelled out. School administrators never spoke of it again; it was as if Dennis Hastert’s written ode to Boy Scout life had never existed.
By the time the current Oklahoma Superintendent took the position, new Oklahoma laws were on the books, making it illegal to mention that there ever was a seventh book. We had six, state law insisted, and so that is what I now remember as well.
What was it like, growing up in a public school system that only allowed six books? In some ways, it was good; in some ways, it was bad.
Our teachers were certainly grateful that they could carry the entire school library into class with them on days it needed to be referenced. On the bad side, there were at least two occasions in which somebody, whether it be a teacher or student or janitor, left the entire school library on a cafeteria table or forgot it in a restroom, forcing classes to be postponed while the whole school searched for it.
The most challenging days were when book reports were assigned. There were between 25 to 28 students in my eighth-, ninth-, and 10th-grade classes, which meant that the first six students to get to the library got one of the six books, and all the others would have to accept a zero on the assignment. It brought average grades down a lot. But it also meant that no matter what subject you were studying, once you had written a book report for each of the six available books, you could phone in the rest of your academic life from then until your graduation. You had it covered. I turned in my report on “What Bill Bennett taught us in The Book of Virtues” no fewer than six times from eighth to 10th grade.
There was one disadvantage of the Oklahoma six-book school policy that far outstripped all the others, however. You will note that the school library’s full and complete range of subject matter is represented by two books by a conservative moral scold, one by a conservative amateur historian, two collections of documents about politics and government, and one—and exactly one—Bible.
We didn’t have library books about biology. Or chemistry. Or physics, or geometry, or algebra, and I’ll tell you that it was a heck of a time writing up reports about the role of mitochondria in cellular respiration with just those six books for reference.
This would inevitably lead to awkward constructions like, “According to conservative moralist William Bennett, mitochondria can be praised for self-discipline and a healthy work ethic, but fall short on matters of loyalty and faith.” Or, “The sum of angles in a triangle was, according to historian David Barton, determined by Benjamin Franklin to be ‘Christ.'”
I can’t tell you how useful it would have been to have even a single copy of “Charlotte’s Web” back when I was supposed to make a poster about spiders for the school science fair. Nope. The state of Oklahoma wasn’t going to disrupt the entire public school system by adding a new book that was neither a Bible nor political.
I remember one 10th-grade classmate, a sort of nerdy kid who planned to attend college, who launched a letter-writing crusade against the Oklahoma Department of Education for providing only six books. He attended school board meetings. He posted flyers. He even went to the state capital to make his case.
It was all for nothing. In Oklahoma, school officials said, everything students in the state needed to know was contained in those six books. If the Federalist Papers didn’t have anything to say about cellular reproduction, you didn’t need to know it. If the Bible doesn’t tell you the chemical composition of the atmosphere, and David Barton doesn’t mention it either, what possible reason would Oklahoma students have for wanting to know it?
The question came down to “parental rights,” they said. Parents had the right to expect Oklahoma schools would not expose their children to any ideas they themselves hadn’t been exposed to, and the only plausible way to protect those parental rights was to forbid books that might include new or contradictory information.
I’ve got a lot of good memories about my Oklahoma childhood, and a lot of bad memories, but it’s amazing how a single tweet from Oklahoma Superintendent of Education Ryan Walters can bring the sights, sounds, and even smells of those days back so vividly. The crisp sound of a turning page. The Scholastic Book Fairs, in which the school cafeteria was filled with not six books, but dozens of copies of those six books. (If you bought your own copy of “The Book of Virtues,” it came with a full-sized poster of Bill Bennett at the craps table. I still remember how those kids would strut around like they were junior high school big shots.)
But I do worry a little about Walters pulling this political stunt. He may be the new superintendent of Oklahoma schools, but that doesn’t mean he should have used his power to borrow an entire Oklahoma school library for his little video. Which school did Walters’ office take these books from? Did they even check whether the students there had book reports due? Somewhere in Oklahoma, there’s a school library that’s gone completely missing, perhaps without explanation, and back in my day, if that happened the whole student body would have to stay after school and search until somebody found it again.
So that’s bad form, right there. I understand that Oklahoma’s new superintendent needed to prove, good and hard, that Oklahoma school libraries did too have books in them, but there had to have been a less disruptive way to do it than to take the whole six-book collection.
