The continual, if usually dormant, threat of censorship poses one of the most hair-raising problems for any high-school English teacher, not only because of the moral obligation to support freedom of speech as one of the tenets of our profession, but also because the more controversial (and therefore more likely to be censored) a work is, the more able its teacher must be to justify it in terms of its importance to a student's education. During the first four years that I taught, I had no particular difficulty in justifying either to myself, to students, or to parents, the value of any work I taught. In fact, I have seldom-if ever-even worried about the possibility of controversy associated with anything I was teaching. However, this year our highschool English department added Toni Morrison's Bluest Eye to the curriculum of the eleventhand twelfth-grade American Literature course I was teaching, and for the first time I was faced with the responsibility of teaching a work of literature which I knew was likely to arouse parental objection. Our department had been wanting to add to the curriculum a major work by an African American writer, and this particular one was recommended by our visiting committee during the North Central Association review. The committee's recommenda-