Let’s take a look at this contention and see how it works. When you set food before immature school age children do you also set poison before them and let them choose? What brings quicker and more intense condemnation on a school or home than allowing poison receptacles to be within reach of youngsters? Is it censorship to snatch poison off the food table of children? When you get out the toys for children to play with, do you also include matches? Is it censorship to snatch away the matches from a child’s hands? Do we not go to great expense in millions of dollars to provide radiant heat, steam heat, and circulating warmed air for safety in our schools? No expense is spared to provide the im possibility of harm from heat or lack of it. Is that censor ship? Do we give our growing youths knives and ice picks to play with or do we give them baseballs and footballs, tennis balls and running tracks? Is that censorship? I could give a score of such illustrations but one more will suffice, I hope. Do we let even our high school students take an automobile out into our modem traffic? Surely, they are intelligent and smart. They know how to handle the wheel and the gears. But have they the experience, have they the judgment? Even after eighteen years of age some adult has to assume the risk and sign up to be re sponsible for the minor-driver’s acts until he is twenty- one. Is that censorship? No, I think that the human race has learned a few things in five thousand years of record ed history and one is that adults must be responsible for the training of youth, that in their impressionable and formative years youth must be guided. A student in our schools has a moral right to trust that his text books are the truth and dependable and that even library books are not false and misleading. Even habits and vices tolerated in adults are so much more harmful to growing bodies. Why is it that we prohibit the sale of alcohol and tobacco to school age students? Are not young and growing minds in as great a need for food and protection? Is it censorship if, in selecting books for our school children’s desks and libraries, that our school board mem bers insist on books that “ impress on the minds of the pupils the principles of morality?” If that be censorship let’s have more of it. Is it censorship for board members to insist on the selection of books that will encourage truth and justice? Is it censorship to insist on the selection of books that teach patriotism? I warn you that patriotism, like everything else, has to be taught and to be taught effectively it has to permeate all our books and it has to be lived sincerely by both parent and teacher. I cannot think of a nation worthy of a name but which has been built on the patriotism of its people, particularly its young people. I can name many nations that have been quickly pillaged and destroyed when their people lost the ideals of patriotism and service to their country. The tragic end of that nation hastens on apace. I know that there are authors who laugh at the virgin ity of young womanhood, but their writings need not be selected for our young people. More than half of our pub lic school students come from Christian homes where God and His» Holy Scriptures are respected. Shall their ideals and standards be insulted and derided by our school books? They need not be. There are plenty of good books. The best science supports morality, truth, justice, and patriotism. True science of government, correct science includes all these attributes of loyal citizenship. Books and teachers who are purveyors of strange ideologies are enemies indeed who would cripple our children in mind and pervert their honor and understand ing. Not only must our educational methods be patterned on American freedoms, our texts vibrant with the recita
tion of the true facts of American liberties and accom plishments, but we must seek, as authors for all school books for our youth, loyal leaders who are deeply in love with American liberties. We entrust our property to employees. We commit our earnings to bankers for safekeeping. We depend on physi cians for our health. But for the development of the high est ideals of character in our children, for their training and competence in the affairs of this life we depend on school board members to provide good texts in the hands of good teachers. There is no greater earthly trust, no higher responsibility. When the great engineers designed the Golden Gate bridge they did not build it just exactly strong enough, but with the great excess strength to meet the unknown stresses of traffic and weather. There is the same need in human character for strength to meet the unexpected strain. There must be a margin of safety of strength be yond the expected need to prevent disaster. So in selecting our books we should seek to provide that margin of safety and, if necessary to err, to err on the side of safety. This is a true maxim in all fields of human endeavor. It is the responsibility of our school board members, and of parents in selecting such representatives, to take care that all of our school materials will help our teachers to build strong willed young people, clean in mind and body, that all of our school activity is designed to inspire our young men to be courageous and loyal and our young women to be beautiful in character and person with that inner beauty of the soul that shines through the outward face. Mr. Dilworth is also a member of the Board of Directors, The Bible Institute of Los Angeles, Inc.
JUNE, 1961
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