The Ten Most Harmful Books--Are You Kidding?

Through a list serve to which I belong I received notice that Human Events, the National Conservative Weekly since 1944 (their blurb!), “asked a panel of fifteen conservative scholars an public policy leaders to help compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries.” Okay. I have quoted this post exactly because I don’t want you to think I am making this up!! I will offer here a link to an article I wrote called “The Book That Changed My Life, or What I didn’t Read on My Summer Vacation,” as an alterative to the idea in the Human Events list. As if the list itself isn’t the silliest thing in the world, (if there is an idea in the whole notion of this list) absurd as it is, and will be always ridiculous. Number One most harmful book is Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. Second, (though I don’t know if it is a close second or not!), was Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Third, as you might expect given the direction here, is The Quotations of Chairman Mao. In fourth place is Alfred Kinsey’s The Kinsey Report. Well, I saw the movie, Kinsey, so perhaps this might have had something to do with this high placement. Ah, well. Do you suppose that the scholars asked to list these books were appalled by the subject of the Kinsey Report, or were angered by being discovered in their sexual behaviors?

So far, well, the list, silly as it is, is also horribly predictable. And remarkably limited. Of course, once a book makes the list, is it more or less harmful. Worse, shouldn’t we all read these books now so that we know what ideas to avoid?

But when I arrive at the book nominated in fifth place, I ceased laughing. For right underneath Chairman Mao, and right before Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (I assume Volume I), is John Dewey’s Democracy and Education. I cannot begin to deal with this absurdity. Finally, I understand the condition of apoplexy. Because it seems to be that one reason the conservative agenda knows enough to name the ten most harmful books is because they were educated in a democracy and John Dewey’s Democracy and Education is an eloquent advocacy for a social system constructed on a foundation of an educational establishment in which social justice and individual contentment co-depend and co-exist. Without an educational system based in Democracy and Education, without a social system advocated in Democracy in Education, then all of those harmful books wouldn’t even be known as harmful. They’d be permanent policy!

As if books could ever be harmful!! What happened to the whole idea of education as learning to read with critical intelligence?

How absurd! How silly to have wasted my time on such idiocy!