Banned

Our children's education can't afford our apathy

It’s Banned Book Week, and the 2023-2024 school year saw the largest number of challenged and banned books in history. According to PEN America, more than 10,000 titles were removed from school library shelves in the United States – nearly triple the number from the previous school year. “Our numbers are certainly an undercount,” according to a PEN America memo, “as stories of book bans often go underreported. These numbers also do not account for the many reports of soft censorship, including increased hesitancy in book selection, ideologically-driven restrictions of school book purchases, the removal of classroom collections, and the cancellations of author visits and book fairs.” SLJ News Bites.

The threat of a book ban in my kids’ school district in 2023 was the match to the tinder of my own activism, and shifted my focus from fictional world-building to stabilizing the foundation of freedom for my kids in the real world. The freedom to read is foundational to the freedom to learn, to speak, and to act, and I believe those freedoms to be fundamental to a healthy society.

The banners of books use sex, violence, “family values,” LGBTQ+ content, and disruptive behavior as their reasons for removing children’s books from school and public library shelves. They use most of the same rationale for removing adult books too. Book banners don’t take accountability for their own children’s reading material, so they attempt to use the public, government-funded institutions, which are built on the foundations of freedom and education, to do it for them. These book banners are also generally conservative Republicans who think big government is a waste of taxpayer money, and yet their efforts to ban books not only rely on big government intervention, they also cost school districts between $30,000 and $100,000 of tax payer funds, plus hundreds of staff hours not spent teaching kids.

When my kids were in elementary school, the Scholastic Book Fair was like a national holiday to all of us, and each kid would get to choose one book for themselves and one book for their classroom library. A couple of years ago, Scholastic Books attempted to mollify the book banners by creating a separate list of “diverse” books that school districts could opt out of receiving for their book fairs, and the outcry was massive. Within three months, Scholastic had reversed the incredibly harmful decision, but the snowball had already begun rolling downhill. Districts in conservative areas began replacing Scholastic with other book fairs that promised no “racial or LGBTQ content” in their book offerings, possibly costing Scholastic as much as $110 million in lost revenue since their disastrous decision to create a separate list.

I’d be lying if a small part of me didn’t admit to thinking that it served them right for attempting to make life more comfortable for bigots, but I’m also incredibly sad that the company, which has done so much for childhood literacy for so many years, didn’t stand firm against the parents and school boards and districts that are taking their culture wars into libraries, classrooms, and book fairs.

I didn’t consider the content of the books my kids bought at the book fairs, or pulled off the shelves in the libraries, because I trusted and still trust the librarians, teachers, and editors who publish children’s books. The best librarians are the ones who make sure that every one of the kids who come in can find a book about things they’re interested in, and each child has the opportunity to see themselves or their friends in a story. I often read the books my kids were reading (out loud to them, or side by side) just to have common ground to talk about, but it was never a condition, again because of trust. If I’d been more mindful, I would have actively chosen a more diverse range of stories and characters, but honestly, I was just happy when my kids found something they liked to read. If I had a young child now, I would absolutely use the banned books lists as supplemental reading lists, just to make sure my kids had well-rounded exposure to ethnicities, genders, sexual preferences, histories, and cultural stories beyond our own. As it was, my kids were exposed to a lot of sci-fi and fantasy (because those were my favorites), historical mysteries (also my favorites) and magic.

I was recently involved in putting on a symposium about safe schools for LGBTQ+ students, and one of the high school kids mentioned that bullying, especially in middle school, is so common it’s almost ubiquitous. He felt that if his classmates had grown up seeing gay characters in books, they wouldn’t have seen him as “other” when he came out in 8^th grade. And a big focus of the symposium, which was directed toward school administrators, counselors, and staff, was on effective and productive allyship. Reading about LGBTQ+ characters, rooting for their stories, and feeling the same emotions of joy and sorrow that they do creates early acceptance and empathy. The same holds true for any and all characters – when we see ourselves, our neighbors, our friends, or the strangers on the street in the stories we read, we see their humanity, and we find the threads which connect us to each other. That’s the kind of allyship that bonds communities together, and all of us, but especially children, thrive in supportive and connected communities.

The books our children read serve so many purposes – literacy and entertainment, education and empathy, a feeling of being seen and of being connected – and when a book about Black history is banned, how do you think the child who loved that book felt, or the one who looked like the author? And when the LGBTQ character was reviled for being “pornographic” how emboldened did it make the bully? Ironically, the book banners are crying “parental rights” when they remove books from library shelves, and yet my parental rights to a well-rounded, inclusive education for my kids are being infringed upon by their actions.

An attempted book banning made me an activist, and now I’ll forever question a candidate’s stand on books and reading and freedom. Our children’s education can’t afford our apathy, because frankly, if they don’t learn it in school, that means a whole classroom or district or generation of kids are missing the lessons on empathy and connection that stories teach through the characters who might just look like our kids.