School Censorship: Why are complaints about American schoolbooks on the rise?

What Johnny can, should or shouldn't be reading in school is a question that inflames political passions. Across the country, irate parents are confronting school officials with demands that certain books be removed from required class reading, deleted from lists of optional reading or removed entirely from library shelves. Complaints range from profane language to sexual explicitness to "anti-Christian" images to unflattering renderings of minorities. School boards, teachers and parents have been joined by activists on the Right and the Left in battling the issues in communities and in the courts. The growing controversy has exposed fundamental legal and ethical questions over who makes decisions in a democratic society's schools, and whether parents who try to affect book selections are trying to exercise undue censorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]