by Emerson Unertl-Coffman ’28
December 10, 2024
With the end of the Tennessee 2024 legislative session in late April, several new bills were signed into law. One of these, which has only taken effect recently, is an update to the Age-Appropriate Materials Act of 2022.
The original law required local boards of education to make a list of books in school libraries available to the public, implement a procedure for complaints about said books to be processed, and a method for the collection to be periodically reviewed.
The new update adds a clause that states that collections must be “suitable for the age and maturity levels of the students who may have access.”
The content defined as unsuitable includes “in whole or in part contains nudity, or descriptions or depictions of sexual excitement, sexual conduct, excess violence, or sadomasochistic abuse” or “appeals to the prurient interest.”
The prurient interest is defined as “a shameful or morbid interest in sex.”
Excess violence is defined as “depiction of acts of violence in such a graphic or bloody manner as to exceed common limits of custom and candor, or in such a manner that it is apparent that the predominant appeal of the material is portrayal of violence for violence’s sake.”
9th and 10th grade English teacher Dr. Phil Bandy thinks that these guidelines present a simplified and biased view of books.
“I feel like from every possible perspective, I’m inclined to think of it as entirely unreasonable,” Bandy said. “From a literary point of view, it reduces a lot of what happens in literature to extremely simplified terms.”
Bandy also feels that some terms in the law are much too malleable.
“A term like ‘prurient’ feels so perfectly manipulatable. What is excessive? How do we delineate an excessive interest in a topic that might be sexual?,” he said. “This feels like a deliberately vague word that can be used to enforce a particular group’s set of desires.”
Wilson County’s school system has recently acted upon this law, banning nearly 400 books from school libraries.
Many of the banned titles, such as The Court Of Thorns And Roses and The Hate U Give, are readily available to USN students in the school library.
Shelves in the USN library containing several books banned in Wilson County. (via the Peabody Press)
Kate Pritchard, librarian at USN, thinks that there are some scenarios where a book would be banned, but disagrees with the methods used.
“I can see a situation where you know, we might say this is not an appropriate book for this library, but I’m thinking about fairly extreme examples,” Pritchard said. “Whereas books that are being targeted by laws like the Age Appropriate Materials Act are the sorts of books that we typically do have in our library because they’re written for teenagers or middle schoolers.”
She also recalls instances when books in USN’s library have been challenged, and the general peace of those challenges.
“We’ve had a few challenges from parents, and I always try to approach that as a conversation. What is it about this book that they feel is objectionable? How much of it did they read? For all of those challenges, we were always able to resolve it at the conversation level,” Pritchard said.
One other book banned in Wilson County is Nickel Boys, which USN’s 9th grade English classes will be reading next semester.
Dana Mayfield, another 9th grade English teacher, agrees that The Nickel Boys would probably violate the terms listed in the Age-Appropriate Materials Act.
“[In] The Nickel Boys, there’s sexual abuse that’s happening at the school, and some of the staff have predatory habits, and it talks about it. It’s really off screen, but that is part of what’s happening in the book, and part of the neglect and abuse that leads to the trauma in the book. So I can imagine that some may be uncomfortable with that,” Mayfield says. “We [also] have one scene where [the writer] very vividly describes the corporal punishment that is used by the school.”
However, she does not think that this should disqualify it from being taught in schools.
“I think that [The Nickel Boys has] merits that can be helpful for students, for objectives of our course, and for appealing to their curiosity and interest,” she said.
