In the West, educational censorship dates to the earliest educational innovators, the sophists. The Spartans, for example, told the sophist Hippias that they would only approve of his lectures of ancient history. A generation later, Plato outlined in The Republic a censorship regime for his imagined kallipolis to flourish – an argument that one critic described as having “hung like a stench over discussions about censorship for two millennia” (Berkowitz, 2021, pp. 20-21). In this essay, Avi Mintz explores how educational censorship in antiquity differs from school censorship since the Enlightenment. While educational censorship in antiquity focused on the complete removal of targeted teachers, ideas and, materials from society, modern school censorship focused on school curriculum alone. This change was controversial in the Enlightenment. Some believed that, in a society increasingly tolerant of a range of views, schools must be free from curricular control. Others, however, argued that censorship was even more important in a time of pluralism; how else could social cohesion and patriotism be cultivated among diverse citizens? As Benjamin Rush (1965/1786) famously put it, schools must be used to “convert men into republican machines” (p. 10). Modern approaches to school censorship raise a challenging question: How might we distinguish the inevitable selection involved in curriculum from censorship? Mintz argues that no meaningful distinctions between the two exist; they are distinctions without a difference. However, these debates about censorship or curriculum selection – whatever we choose to call them – remain important: they present opportunities for articulating a vision for what our society and our citizens might become.
Avi I. Mintz (2026) studied this question.