Playbill: The Educational Theatre Association (EdTA) has released its 2024 State of Theatre Education Report, and this year's findings included continued and growing censorship pressures on theatre educators. The report summarizes findings from a study of more than 1,800 theatre educators in public and private schools across the U.S.
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Censorship is such a major issue within education, and especially theater education. With increased book banning, laws regulating queer conversations in public spaces, and other similar laws, the fear around teaching theater is very real and affects everyone. This issue, I fear, is only going to become more of an issue within the next couple of years under a heavily Republican presidency. Even with legal barriers, many teachers are brave and will continue to teach important lessons to their young students despite the danger in doing so. I’m eternally grateful that my education was spent without such heavy censorship, and that when I had theater classes I was able to learn in a more collaborative and open manner with access to tough conversations and plays/novels that are regularly censored in schools now. I commend any teacher who would risk their career to defy censorship and teach despite it.
In my experience censorship usually detracts from the educational experience. Censorship usually happens when there is a theme that makes people uncomfortable. Let's be real, the best shows are the ones that lean into the uncomfortable aspects of being a human being. The impact of censorship is not allowing students to learn about death, LGBTQ+, political forms of government, to historical events. These topics are scary and hard to understand but theater offers a beautiful experience to safely explore topics like grief and how a character copes with loss. Characters after all are reflections of people we see existing in society and we grow to understand aspects of our world through playing out these stories. The Laramie Project is a perfect example of this, how do we teach our kids to be empathetic to the LGBTQ+ experience? Its hard but by exploring a dark story of a very real LGBTQ+ experience it forces individuals to engage on a very personal level to what happened and why. This is how we grow as a society by becoming more aware of the topics and problems we are going through. How do they affect the individual, society, households, schools? All the world is the stage, because the stage is a projection of the world, don't limit the life on stage, because we don't want to limit the life experience that theater provides.
While these reports of censorship are concerning, I’d like to start by saying that it is reassuring that the Educational Theater Association has resources available to support educators and that they are continuing to work to find ways to support these educators. Part of the reason this is reassuring is because I believe that the current political climate and the recent election of Donald Trump will only make these issues worse and actually begin to become codified into federal law, or as least that these issues will get worse as there are threats of codified law around these choices. This is primarily due to the fact that there are recent threats against the department of education which will mean that not only will vocal community members who oppose certain representations in theater will put pressure to move away from these subjects, but also that administrators and higher ranking staff will begin to heavily weigh on these educators and their choices- potentially even threatening their jobs dependent on their choices. I remain concerned, but hope that educators find ways to navigate these times.
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