Schools are supposed to open children's minds, said The New York Times in an editorial. So it's disturbing that the Miami-Dade, Fla., School Board would ban the children's book "A Visit to Cuba" from its libraries over allegations that it paints too rosy a picture of life under the Castro regime. But it's even more disturbing that a federal appeals court would uphold such an "unconstitutional" ban.
That, of course, is a call for the Supreme Court, said Eugene Volokh in The Volokh Conspiracy. And it has said before that the free speech clause of the Constitution doesn't mean that elementary schools can't exclude books that omit important information. This book says, "People in Cuba eat, work, and go to school like you do"—leaving out the unpleasant fact that Cuba is an "oppressive Communist dictatorship" is a big omission.
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