The New Yorker has a fine essay by Annie Julia Wyman, a graduate of Highland Park High School in Dallas (and now a Ph.D candidate at Harvard) reflecting on the "book-banning" there, the conservative and homogeneous nature of the community, and the particular importance of a liberal education to their students.
The basics of the story have been diaried here and are pretty well known. The New Yorker piece provides the needed perspective of an obviously bright woman who found the world outside "the bubble" of Highland Park to be a place for which she was not completely prepared.
More below the curly lines.
The superintendent of the Highland Park Independent School District was buffaloed by a seemingly large and insistent group, and seven books which dealt with such topics as poverty, sex and diversity were removed from possible use. However, when the story got legs both locally and nationally, more reasonable folks began to speak up. Large numbers of local residents, students, parents, and alumni "un-buffaloed" (?de-buffaloed?) the super into restoring all but one of the books.
I can vouch for the fact that the Highland Park School District contains a number of the richest and most conservative Bible-thumping captains of industry (particularly oil and gas) in the country. The schools are superior, though sadly lacking in diversity, and the police force is ever-vigilant and ever-suspicious of anyone whose skin color surpasses heavy freckling, particularly between the hours of 6pm and 6am. The author of the New Yorker piece (a Highland Park alumna and with graduate degrees from Stanford and Harvard) avoids divisive rhetoric and succinctly makes the case that the scions of "the bubble" need exposure to the way the rest of the world lives, and that books are actually a pretty gentle way for that objective to be met. A couple of quotes from her essay:
The Dallas Morning News reported that parents were concerned about books containing “anti-capitalist sentiment,” which is, again, unsurprising: in the state-mandated curriculum for Texas public schools, exposure to what is called the free enterprise system begins in kindergarten.
Yes, you read it right.....KINDERGARTEN.
Upon leaving "the bubble", the author recalls:
I could see only that I came from homogeneity; I was terrified I would be rejected from the new life I’d stumbled into, a life that was richer and more complex. But I should have been more honest. I never would have known to be embarrassed had I not gone to world-class public schools where I read whatever I wanted. Books were there, and they had taught me to value difference.
Highly recommended.