ST. LOUIS — Missouri state lawmakers have proposed the most “educational intimidation bills†in the country aimed at censoring certain books and topics in schools, says a new report from an advocacy group for free expression.
The bills mainly involve topics of race and gender, creating “a chilling effect that creates the conditions for censorship indirectly, threatening the freedoms to teach and learn†by pressuring teachers and librarians to be more restrictive, according to “Educational Intimidation: How ‘Parental Rights’ Legislation Undermines the Freedom to Learn†released Wednesday by New York nonprofit PEN America.
since January 2021 outpace Texas (21), Oklahoma (20), South Carolina (18), Indiana (17) and Mississippi (16). All but one of the bills in Missouri were sponsored by Republicans, and several were labeled as some version of a “Parents’ Bill of Rights.â€
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“Many of these bills enable one parent to make decisions about what can be taught or read not just for their own child but for all children in a school or district,†reads the report. “As such, despite the common usage of ‘parents’ rights’ rhetoric, these bills actually disempower the majority of parents and empower an activist minority to make curricular decisions for all students in a school or district.â€
The report points to Missouri Senate Bill 4 as an example of educational intimidation through curriculum inspection. The bill, sponsored by Sen. Andrew Koenig, R-Manchester, passed the Senate in the spring but did not make it through the House.
Under the bill, schools would have been required to post all curriculum, textbooks, sourcebooks and other classroom materials in full text on their websites.
Only one of the Missouri bills in the report has been signed into law by Gov. Mike Parson. The 2022 law bans visual depictions of “explicit sexual material†in public and private schools, leading to the removal of at least 97 books in school districts across the ºüÀêÊÓƵ region. The list of banned books includes comic book versions of “The Handmaid’s Tale,†“1984†and “Maus,†a Holocaust memoir that depicts Nazis as cartoon cats and Jews as mice.
ºüÀêÊÓƵ Public Schools did not ban any books in response to the law, but “Maus†was removed as an option from the high school English curriculum this fall.