The sensitive question of whether censorship is permissible in the classroom has not been effectively explored, nor has there been an exhaustive survey of all occurrences of public censorship in schools. Through tracking all public occurrences, this article seeks to understand whether censorship is ever justified in both the English classroom and the school beyond. The language surrounding occurrences revealed three different social discourses about the agency of the child: "purity and danger," "the pedagogy of the oppressed," and "liberal consensus." Whether text censorship is justified is ultimately a nuanced ethical issue concerning what constitutes the good society and the free agency of its children. From a social utilitarian position, I conclude that the "liberal consensus" model is most constructive for the Australian social contract, and argue for a rare case for censorship when a consensus model is undermined.