The parent of a student at Culpeper County public school made a request to his child’s school administrators to stop assigning and teaching the historical diary of Anne Frank to its students. According to the parent who made the request, the book contained objectionable passages – specifically, sexually explicit material and homosexual themes. Surprisingly, administrators of the Virginia elementary school did not dismiss or ignore the objections of this parent to the historical document. They granted the parent’s request. All copies of the diary were subsequently removed from classrooms.

James Allen, director of instruction at the 7,600-student school, said that school officials immediately chose to pull the book from classrooms. The particular version being used was The Diary of a Young Girl: the Definitive Edition, which was published on the 50th anniversary of Frank’s death in a Nazi concentration camp. This version includes passages previously excluded from the widely-read original edition, first published in Dutch in 1947.

Allen decided to replace the version of the diary with a different, older publication, which did not contain the controversial passages. The older version of the diary was arranged by Anne Frank’s father, the only member of her immediate family who survived the Holocaust, who had removed sections which had revealed Anne’s emerging sexual desires and descriptions of her sometimes stormy relationship with her mother.

As Allen explained, Culpeper’s policy on “public complaints about learning resources” requires complaints to be submitted in writing and for a review committee to research the materials and deliberate. In this case, the policy was not followed. Allen said the parent registered the complaint orally, no review committee was created and a decision was made quickly by at least one school administrator.

How did James Allen feel about the decision being made hastily and without convening a committee? He said he is uncertain about the details of the case because he was out of town. “The person came in, and the decision was made that day . . . and that’s fine. We would like to have had it in writing. It just did not happen.” Allen also said that a copy of the more recent version of the text will be held in the school library while the earlier version will be used in classes.

There is no excuse for the swift decision made by the mysterious party responsible for the removal of the diary from classrooms. While a majority agreement would not necessarily have led to the best decision about what to teach or not to teach, it at least would have been a step in the direction of honest education. One unsatisfied parent was able to have the curriculum immediately altered according to his own concerns. Requiring a committee to make these decisions, one would think, is intended in part to prevent any one parent from dictating content to an entire school.

But there was no committee convened. There was no investigation into what students have to gain or to lose by replacing the book, and there was no discussion about whether the book being used would offer value and educational enrichment not available from its replacement. There was no exploration of whether the content of the book indeed violates or offends decency or morals or the students’ best interests. There were no conclusions reached about anything, because there was no discussion.

It seems that in society today, when faced with a controversial topic, the simplest, and therefore preferred, plan of action is usually to avoid the issue altogether. This is especially apparent in this recent act of censorship. Both James Allen and the Culpeper teaching faculty may have made their jobs a little easier by sidestepping the difficult and challenging material in the historic diary, but it was hardly the action they should have taken. The person who banned the book from classes made a self-serving decision to avoid having to deal with the controversy. The simplest solution might often be to dodge the difficult confrontations, but it is not the honest one. As President John F. Kennedy once said, “The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth.”

Michael Filippone is a senior at Drexel University. He is studying Music Industry.

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