I was recently listening to a New York Times interview with Emily Drabinski, the president of the American Library Association, about the current rise in school book bannings. She made a few points that made me stop and think. I’ll put these into three categories:

Children’s rights to choose what they read. This is a very interesting core tension. There are extremes on both sides: parents’ rights groups like the questionably-named Moms for Liberty who want total control over all academic content their kids might access (to me it sounds like they want to dumb down public schools into Evangelical homeschooling), vs. authors of these books who want to recognize the importance of kids, particularly queer kids or racial minorities, to explore their identity and to read stories from their own unique perspective. Basically, the key question is who chooses what kids can read. Do kids have a right to choose their own reading, even if parents don’t like what they are reading?

This is one where I’m a little torn. When I was growing up, it was the norm that some books were flagged by the school as requiring parental consent for us to read, so that feels “normal” to me. However, I grew up in a household where my parents would just sign off on whatever the school was recommending; parental trust in institutions was high (as it was when my own kids were in school). Kids whose parents refused were viewed with some suspicion by classmates. We assumed their parents were controlling, infantilizing them, probably religious weirdos.

Something that wasn’t clear to me as a student was the process to approve these books. Now that I’m an adult, I’ve got a little more insight into this. I’ve shared here before that my daughter’s principal was fired over a book some parents objected to. The principal was near retirement and basically fell on the sword to protect the teacher (who escaped punishment). The book was on an optional AP summer reading list for juniors, so not required, but it didn’t have a parental consent form, and it hadn’t been cleared by the school board, which was the procedure.

One of my former classmates in my hometown is running to head up the school board on a platform of actually burning books. Another of my classmates (I went to school in a small college town in PA where these controversies are playing out right now) is tasked with personally reading 40K books to ensure there are no content problems. That strikes me as madness. There are also national readers that do this work and make these recommendations, so redoing it locally feels like unnecessary rework. AI programs have also been used to search books for objectionable content.

  • Where is the line between parental control over their child’s mental life, and the child’s choice to read what they want without parental oversight?
  • Should untrained, uncertified parents override academics on school content? Which parents?
  • How does internet access figure into this discussion? As my daughter pointed out when we found out about her principal, every kid with a smart phone has instant access to actual porn and all kinds of content. Or as I countered, if kids want to hear profanity and sexual content, just go to high school. That’s where I heard it all.

Banning books = banning people. Drabinski’s main objection to the types of books the right has been banning is that they are books by and about marginalized people, specifically LGBTQ people and racial minorities. Her assessment is that the effort is not to ban content (“explicit” or “inappropriate” or “sexual” content), but to ban the individuals whose existence challenges a cishetero patriarchal supremacy. If we can shove queer people back in the closet, there will be fewer queer people. As Glennon Doyle said, “Being gay isn’t contagious; freedom is.”

One of the most banned books is called Genderqueer. It’s a graphic novel about someone finding out they are queer. It includes a cartoon illustration of a blow job. A friend of mine has been going out of her way to read the banned books, and she was concerned that the illustration made the book unfit for students. As I joked to her: “I agree! They should have to learn about blow jobs on the playground like we did!” She also had heard (erroneously) that this book was in elementary schools (due to it being a graphic novel). In reality, the book had been reviewed and deemed appropriate for ages 16+, and was intended for teachers and adults to read for their own education rather than for students. Should school libraries have this book? Should parents have to consent to their kids reading it? Does it depend on their age?

  • Does banning the stories of queer people and people of color effectively ban their perspectives, giving preference to white, cishetero, patriarchal viewpoints?
  • Should all sexual content be banned whether cishetero or queer? Where is the line drawn?

How books are classified. She talked about the example of how books about transgender people have been historically classified, and that this both reflects societal views and also reinforces those views. If you go back a few decades, those books were classified with books on abnormal psychology. Later they might have been classed with self-help. Now maybe they are in with either LGBTQ books or even just memoirs. These classification decisions shape our views and acceptance of people and concepts.

If you’ve ever watched old movies, you’ll see the way these attitudes pervade public thought. In the movie the Tender Trap, a character is talking to his therapist about his jealousy of his male friend’s success with women, but the therapist misunderstands and believes he is expressing homosexual feelings toward his friend. As a result, he treats him as abnormal, requiring extensive therapy. (This is played for comedy in the movie). Homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder at the time this movie was made. Books on homosexuality would have been in the abnormal psychology section.

Consider another possible classification. If there is a book on Mormons, it could be classified with religious books or if there is a section on conspiracy theories or cults, it could be classified there. Maybe it would depend on the type of book or the author’s intent. But where books on this topic are classified reflects how society views our minority religion. Is it sitting on a shelf next to books on Catholicism or next to books on Scientology? Who makes these decisions?

  • Do you see how classification of books both reflects and reinforces societal attitudes about people?

Drabinski also made another fantastic (and I imagine, uncontroversial) point about the expansionist role libraries can play in society, providing more goods than just books. What a wonderful idea! She gave the example of a public library with a carpet shampooer. The waitlist was long, but being able to borrow it and return it was a huge benefit to locals.

My ears immediately perked up at this idea because on my recent trip to PA, an old classmate of mine mentioned (in response to my statement that I became one of those “pandemic puzzle people,” doing jigsaw puzzles) that there was one of those local free library boxes across from my Airbnb that also had a free puzzle box, a large cabinet where people could leave a puzzle they were done with and take one they hadn’t done yet. My first thought was what a wonderful idea (there is an accompanying FB page as well), and also that I wondered if public libraries also offer puzzles. If not, why not? Certainly puzzles are like books in that you could keep a book you love forever, but some books can be read once and returned. So it is with puzzles, and so it is with many many public goods. My hometown has also added a public piano in the town square. Anyone walking by can bring their own sheet music, sit down, and play. Nearby Lancaster, PA has 15 public pianos, decorated with artistic murals.

  • Do you like this expansionist view of libraries? What other public goods do you think we should make available to all? What’s on your wish list?
  • What if our wards had these types of locally available goods for signing out? Would this increase retention and the value of belonging to a ward? I have to think it might, unless they spoil it with a bunch of restrictions and rules [1].

I was also listening to the Velshi Book Banning podcast, an interview with Margaret Atwood (author of the Handmaid’s Tale). She was quick to point out that banning a book (which librarians hate) is not the same as restricting what books are available for school children based on age and content. However, as the interview unfolded, it was discussed that Shakespearean plays have been banned (due to “divisive” content), and Toni Morrison books (and books by other black authors) have been banned by some school boards due to portraying slavery in a bad light including some of the most disturbing aspects of enslavement.

The fact that some of these same schools are green lighting Praeger U. content shows the real agenda; it’s not protecting the children. It’s promoting simplistic and inaccurate narratives that paint conservative views and maintaining the status quo in a positive light, even when discussing slavery and recent civil rights abuses. They are claiming that schools are “indoctrinating” kids rather than teaching critical thinking, but their solutions all seem to be to . . . indoctrine kids. That’s fine if we want to raise a generation of dumb-as-rocks bigots whose worlds are rocked when they get to college and find out they’ve been lied to their whole lives. But then again, college attendance is also under fire, criticized as too expensive, unnecessary and “too woke.” Certainly these critiques have a kernel of truth that should be discussed, but throwing out the baby with the bathwater just leaves you with a lost generation.

Then again, there’s nothing that makes a kid more likely to read something than banning it. I doubt authors are going to deliberately seek notoriety to increase sales, but it seems to be a clear byproduct of banning that kids will be more interested in these books.

Discuss.