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Early in our careers as librarians in the United States, we learn about censorship, the First Amendment, and the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom’s 100 most challenged books. We know that books are usually challenged with best intentions - to protect others, frequently children, from controversial ideas and information.
We go on with our professional lives. We attend conference sessions and workshops on intellectual freedom. We write our selection policies and put them in the drawer, yet we rarely have to use those policies to defend our decision to purchase a book.
Occasionally some of us get a more in-depth look at censorship when someone challenges a book in our library and we must defend our students’ rights to access information – rights that may trouble some others. We rely on the U.S. Constitution to support our stance. The First Amendment is a powerful document … but it only works in the United States.
What happens, though, if you are a school librarian outside the United States? Whose laws do you follow? Is intellectual freedom an important part of the foundation of libraries in international schools? Are there policies regarding selection and retention of educational materials in international schools? A colleague from the United Kingdom asked in a message on the European Council of International School {ECIS} librarians list , “Do American values regarding freedom-to-read hold in non-American countries? Should they?”
The Anglo American School of Moscow is where I spend the majority of my time these days. Every day I walk to my fourth floor library, up 87 steps, past the Hall of Flags. From A to Z, these gloriously colored flags represent the cultural diversity of our student body and the 67 countries that our 1250 students call home. They come to our two libraries, elementary and middle/high, in groups and individually, to read, to work collaboratively, to hang out, and to use the computers—for work and for play. The Anglo American School is one of 194 schools worldwide that is “American-sponsored” which means we “receive assistance and support from the U.S. Government under a program administered by the Office of Overseas Schools of the U.S. Department of State ( We are also sponsored by the Canadian and British embassies.) While American sponsored schools incorporate U.S. educational programs, their international context means that their philosophies, programs and procedures are quite diverse.
Do our students and their parents think about the diversity of our collection? Do they know that there is something in our libraries, or available on our library computers, that may offend everyone? The Anglo-American School, like some other American-sponsored international schools has a Board-approved selection and reconsideration policy on their Web site that mirrors anything I would expect to find in the United States.
Excluding U.S. Department of Defense Schools (DODDS), international schools number in the hundreds across the globe—an accurate count depends on your interpretation of the term international school. “Not counting storefronts on the backstreets of Calcutta, Shanghai, Bangkok or such, still, there are a lot of reputable and semi-reputable international schools enrolling host country nationals with a largely foreign teaching staff. So, while the question is impossible to answer, the minimum number is in the 500 to 600 range, more likely 700 or so. The growth of schools in China alone over the past few years (not to mention Dubai) has been phenomenal.” (Name withheld, personal communication, April 2, 2007)
“Just as it is difficult to count the number of schools, it is difficult to make any sweeping generalizations about international schools, including American-sponsored ones. They vary widely in size, funding, curriculum, and demographics of student populations, governance and “ownership”. You can categorize schools by nationality or curriculum (British, American, Swedish, German, and French). Even proprietary schools can be very different - Is one run by a multinational company (Armco, mining companies) different from real estate developers or private individuals?” (Name withheld, personal communication, April 2, 2007)
The European Council of International Schools maintains a listserv for librarians to share ideas and issues. Librarians on the list include primarily those who work in European schools. The list of participants also includes colleagues from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. They are savvy librarians who quickly answered my questions about intellectual freedom issues. I learned that, for some, decisions about what is bought and used is determined by the laws of the countries they live in. For others, decisions are bound by the governing bodies of the school or based on cultural norms of the host country. Generally the owners of the school, embassies, governments, administrators and/or IT directors all have a hand in decision-making in international schools.
With the exception of librarians in the Middle East, my colleagues’ responses are remarkably similar to the range of answers you get in the United States. Some librarians asked not to be named thus, although some are quoted, no one is named. Here is a sampling that represents a cross section of their responses:
Do you have school Intellectual Freedom policies?
Since very few librarians answered this question, I looked through the Web sites of some of the American sponsored schools and found that The American Embassy School New Delhi includes the ALA Library Bill of Rights and the International School of Beijing has policies for the selection of educational materials, and the review and a challenge procedure. Beijing’s library web page also quotes Information Power in their mission statement.
What to do with the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated? (Sports Illustrated became a big issue recently when the company announced that the swimsuit issue would not be sent to public and school libraries.)
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“Just had my first SI swimsuit issue comment. An English teacher came in and said I had to remove that from the shelf because it was soft porn and anti-woman. When I told her that some people wouldn't like her teaching Go ask Alice, she backed down although she was shocked that I would be allowing women to be demeaned like that. I explained about censorship and intellectual freedom, but I'm not sure I convinced her”
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“I put our swimsuit issue out the on the magazine shelf as per all other SI issues. The ONLY response I got was from one teacher saying, "You put it out, brave man." Ha!”
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“When I first came to this Library three years ago, I heard that it was possible to request not to have the coveted swimsuit issue sent, so I wrote EBSCO (from whom we get most of our magazine subscriptions) and asked for it not to be delivered to us. I got a canned postcard back from Sports Illustrated signed by a Jonathan Shar, the Consumer Marketing Director, that we would not get the issue and that our subscription would be extended by an extra week. However, that year we did receive the next swimsuit issue anyway. But I do not remember getting another issue since then. Maybe we were supposed to receive it, but it was lifted between the Embassy mailroom and the Library. We shall see what happens this year.”
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“If I do, indeed, receive the issue this year, I thought maybe I would have a silent auction (teachers' lounge) and get a little money to purchase a few new books for our paperback collection.”
Does your school filter? Are the social networking sites, MySpace and YouTube, blocked at your school?
Yes and no - no and yes! The concerns, which lead to both filtering and blocking of sites by some schools/districts in the United States, are the same concerns held by some international schools.
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“I have no problems but the school does. We don't block, our technical department blocks. They claim that any blocking is due to our Symantec firewall, but as they can override the default blocks that don’t really hold.”
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“Sites can be unblocked on appeal - but it's for the teacher or the student to make the appeal, and I think most don't bother. (I do.) A few weeks ago, I found the FindArticles site blocked completely, and classes researching abortion and AIDS in the library were blocked by "Rating Checks." We got these blocks lifted, but I daresay they'll be back next time there is an update? It is irritating that technicians and not academics create and control the policies.”
Local values, politics, religion, and culture all have a role to play in defining an international school community. In their recruiting specifications, some private schools require that the librarian espouse their school community’s religious values, and that the collection reflect those values as well.
Although cultural traditions of particular countries influence or control both selection and use of materials, nowhere in the world is there a clearer clash with traditional American intellectual freedom values than in the Middle East, and possibly in other Muslim countries. Some schools are required by the host country to modify materials that are illegal. Here are some interesting examples from anecdotal reports from librarians who are working in the Middle East or who have previously worked there.
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A librarian now in Europe reported working in a school in an African country with a National Censorship Board. The librarians in this school were permitted to do their own censoring: art books could be kept intact but objectionable content was deleted from newspapers and magazines. (Summary of an e-mail message.)
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“While working in Saudi Arabia a few years ago I had to be careful as materials were ordered. All orders went through the department of ministry and every book was inspected. Then any books with the cover having exposed female arms or legs were color with a black marker. Also any pictures of any other religion, other than Muslim, were also blackened. (i.e. crosses on the tops of buildings) Then the big one was that pages would be torn out of books, picture books were especially targeted. For example, in ‘George Gets a Medal’ the middle 4 pages were torn out because they depicted pigs. Also in non-fiction books if they referred to certain time periods and history that was not in agreement with the ministry these pages were also ripped out.”
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“I have worked at several Middle East schools and it really varies from country to country. In Qatar, we could put anything on the shelves unless it had to do with Israel. Then, the IB [International Baccalaureate] teacher said he couldn't teach a balanced view of Middle East history without the books and we were able to get that decision reversed. However, we needed to make sure that the item did not portray Arabs negatively. Someone before me had blacked out parts of the pictures in our Art books and I threw them away and ordered new ones. I was pushing the envelope and doing well, but that was the policy of the school. We did withdraw one book that showed the face of one of the saints. This is the biggest no-no. Under no circumstances can you show the face of the prophets.”
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“In Lebanon, we have a banned book list from the government, with very few titles on it. We have the books anyway. We shelf them in our office and kids ask for them. The Da Vinci Code was on the list, why I don't know. Here in Lebanon, mostly anything goes. But the students alter my Atlases and remove the name of the country of Israel; the name for it here is ‘Palestinian Occupied Territories.’”
While cutting out pages of books or modifying them to meet the standards of the host country “censor” is not part of the skill set any librarian learns in Library 101, but denying access to certain materials through the use of filters and firewalls occurs in schools all over the world and the United States is no exception. International librarians reported occasional concerns by parents or by administrators but no formal challenges.
We live in a complex world, one united electronically by access to global information that flows from computer to server to computer. There are no easy answers to the troubling intellectual freedom issues that global Internet access brings, but we need to take to heart a vision of where we’d like to be, even as we deal with the realities of what we currently have.
In 1999 the Freedom Forum asked me for a quote for their annual calendar. I chose a sentence from a speech about the rights that young people have to access information.
"We do not help children when we simply wall them off from information and ideas that are controversial or disturbing. If they are to succeed in the Information Age, they must learn to be discerning users of information."
These words hold true, whether you work in a school library or a public library in the United States, in a Department of Defense school, or in an international school anywhere in the world. Each of us make decisions daily about what we select, how we deal with intellectual freedom, and how far we are willing to go to defend the values at the foundation of librarianship.
In his classic article, “Not Censorship but Selection”, Lester Asheim ends with a powerful statement, “ If we are to gain the esteem we seek for our profession, we must be willing to accept the difficult obligations which those ideals imply.” (Asheim 1953)
Out here in the international school community, beyond the protection of the First Amendment, assuring intellectual freedom can be a more difficult challenge and, sometimes, a lonely task.
Works Cited
Asheim, Lester. "Not Censorship But Selection”, Wilson Library Bulletin, 28 (September 1953), 63-67 . Accessed 3 April 2007.
Further Reading/References
American Library Association Office for Intellectual Freedom. Intellectual Freedom Manual. 7th Ed. Chicago: American Library Association, 2006.
American Library Association Office for Intellectual Freedom Home Page.< http://www.ala.org/oif.html >
Censorship: Opposing Viewpoints (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2005)
The First Amendment Center
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/
Free Expression Clearinghouse: A Guide to Free Speech and the First Amendment.
http://www.freeexpression.org
The Freedom Forum
http://www.freedomforum.org/templates/document.asp?documentID=4020
Intellectual Freedom Manual, Indiana Library Federation Bibliography
http://www.ilfonline.org/IFC/other/bibliography.htm
Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom. Chicago: Intellectual Freedom Committee of the American Library Association. Available by subscription and online at:
https://members.ala.org/nif/
Regional Education Associations, Office of Overseas Schools, U.S. Department of State
http://www.state.gov/m/a/os/c16896.htm
Symons, Ann K. and Charles Harmon. Protecting the Right to Read: A How-To-Do-It Manual for School and Public Librarians (New York, Neal-Schuman, 1995)
Symons, Ann K. and Reed, Sally Gardner. Speaking Out! Voices in Celebration of Intellectual Freedom (Chicago, American Library Association, 1999). |
