Legal Commentary

Banning Dictionaries that Contain Definitions for Sexual Terms from K-8 Classrooms?

By Eugene Volokh

From the Riverside Press-Enterprise:

The Menifee Union School District is forming a committee to review whether dictionaries containing the definitions for sexual terms should be permanently banned from the district?s classrooms, a district official said Friday.

The 9,000-student K-8 district this week pulled all copies of Merriam-Webster?s Collegiate Dictionary after an Oak Meadows Elementary School parent complained about a child stumbling across definitions for ?oral sex.? ...

The collegiate dictionaries were purchased several years ago to allow advanced readers in the fourth and fifth grades to look up words that they didn?t know, Cadmus said.

Fortunately, the ban has been lifted, and rightly so. Setting aside the rare student who actually browses the dictionary, what do you want a student who hears the phrase ?oral sex? to do? Take the word of his fellow fourth? and fifth-graders? Ask a teacher? Maybe you want the student to ask his parents ? and if they say ?we don?t talk about such things,? what?s the student going to do then? As Hit & Run points out, ?Since no child will ever think to look up anything on the Internet, this will definitely work.? (Or would the plan be to also filter out all the online dictionaries?)

Full post as published by The Volokh Conspiracy on January 27, 2010 (boomark / email).