Across the country, families and school boards are pushing to remove texts containing racist language, violent imagery and controversial content from public high school curricula. Most locally, Kennewick School Board in Kennewick, Washington unanimously passed Resolution 2340, which prohibits teaching materials that state or imply that the U.S. is fundamentally or systemically racist or that a group of people is inherently racist, oppressed or victims. District officials in Minnesota’s Duluth Public Schools plan to replace books that cover sensitive topics like “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” with novels that touch on the same topics without the language that they claim makes students uncomfortable. Passed in 2021, Oklahoma House Bill 1775 restricts teaching concepts that make a student feel any kind of psychological distress on account of their race or sex. This is driven, in many cases, by a genuine desire to protect students from content that is painful to confront. However, shielding students from discomfort prevents preparing them for the real world; in the case of harmful or contentious content in the classroom, the instinct to avoid conflict does more damage than the material itself. 

Handled well, difficulty and complexity in educational materials don’t threaten students. Students’ ability to navigate ambiguity is characteristic of a strong education; students who only encounter and process ideas that they are already familiar with never learn to seek out information that challenges their beliefs. This is particularly relevant at the high school level, where students are developing their ability to think critically and independently, especially amid conflicting or uncomfortable viewpoints. Removing opportunities for students to engage with different ideas out of fear of exposing students to contentious content neglects the responsibility schools have to develop civically engaged, open-minded individuals.

Controversial ideas — including those surrounding race, sex, religion and politics — exist in the world regardless of the content of their classes’ syllabi. Eliminating these materials does not remove those ideas from students’ lives. In fact, doing so may harm students by removing opportunities to develop critical thinking skills in the one environment that is designed to help them process those difficult ideas. The classroom environment is uniquely suited to address these topics because it provides structure, a trained facilitator and a roadmap for analysis that students will not have when they encounter the same ideas elsewhere. College, the workplace and civic life all require the ability to engage and disagree with people and ideas that are uncomfortable.

The concern behind schools’ efforts to prevent harm to students is genuine and deserves to be taken seriously. In a public school setting, taxpayers — many of whom are parents — fund their children’s education. Understandably, they want to be informed about the curriculum being taught to their children and the potential for harm from material that could be handled carelessly. Especially for materials containing racist content, students experience and process the content asymmetrically: students from a community directly targeted by that ideology experience the material differently compared to students without that background. One measure teachers can take to mitigate this unequal impact is to provide historical context before students encounter the class materials, so the concepts are framed as artifacts of a specific time and system rather than appearing without explanation. Explicit content warnings that describe what students will experience and why it is being taught also encourage students to be proactive learners without censoring the material. 

The exploration of sensitive concepts in schools contextualizes students’ learning, especially within the disciplines of history and English. The same materials used to teach literary analysis can teach historical context and civic responsibility. Period literature, speeches and other authentic historical texts expose students to prejudiced logic and language used verbatim — an experience that reading sanitized accounts cannot give. Examining these sources develops students’ understanding of history and racism beyond simply discussing the topics. For example, Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” is both a literary and historical record of the prejudice African Americans have endured. Removing texts that acknowledge and document these events threatens to erase the experiences of these communities. Jim Crow laws, the Holocaust and American slavery are most effectively explored with applicable materials. This is important because lessons learned from history can seem otherwise irrelevant — a flawed sentiment since understanding history allows scholars to contextualize the modern world, anticipate future events and avoid repeating past mistakes.

Importantly, the presence of racist materials in education should not be misconstrued as an endorsement of the actions contained within it. Conflating exposure and encouragement disregards the critical understanding that students gain through navigating controversial materials. In addition, if this standard were to be applied consistently, it would also require removing texts that depict political and social violence, religious persecution and sexist beliefs — effectively hollowing out critically acclaimed literature like George Orwell’s “1984,” Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” and Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale.” 

It would be naive to assume that every classroom will address sensitive material in the same way. That is merely the nature of human thinking: every teacher interprets through a different lens of experience, training and personal bias, and each classroom contains students with equally varied backgrounds. However, each discussion of race, violence or other uncomfortable topics in the classroom should be thoughtful and thorough. Teachers should not assign just any text in any context without the ability to facilitate open discussion. Developmental psychology explains that adolescents — high schoolers in particular — are still developing their identities and are more susceptible to internalizing negative self-images. Students should be proactive in their education, but claiming that all high schoolers are ready to engage with sensitive or harmful content generalizes their emotional and cognitive development and risks exposing particular students to material that causes more harm than good. In such cases, choosing alternative educational materials that are appropriate for the individual’s age group and maturity is not the same as censorship. Public high schools have a responsibility to facilitate a curriculum that enriches students’ education, but parents should maintain the right to know the curriculum and request alternatives as well. Teachers can still develop the same skills — though perhaps not the same depth of understanding — in students without using sensitive material. Parents should also be involved in the structured discussion of sensitive topics, as they too are stewards of their student’s education. 

Within the educational community, the question should be how — not if — students should encounter sensitive topics in schools. The public education system is raising the next generation of international leaders: businesspeople, politicians, scientists, thinkers and creators. School doesn’t exist to coddle students with easy-to-digest topics. Students must be prepared to engage with thought-provoking, uncomfortable situations. They should seek to contend with one another in critical discussions. High school, as a transitional environment between adolescence and adulthood, is responsible for facilitating the development of thoughtful students. Each generation inherits the unresolved debates of its predecessors. High school students are nearly adults entering a society that frequently grapples with uncertainty and disagreement. That’s a reality, and engaging with it isn’t optional — it’s the whole point of education.