The complaints run along some familiar themes: Writing by leftist radicals will steer youth toward political extremism literature from LGBTQ authors encourages them to adopt “alternative lifestyles” books that discuss sex and sexuality push them toward risky behaviors.Īt the local level, citizens can act on these concerns by mounting “book challenges” - basically, make a case to libraries and public schools that a book should be removed from shelves because it is inappropriate for children. It is certainly not new to hear conservative parents lamenting that schoolbooks are corrupting their children’s minds. The local level: book challenges in schools A conservative movement that once claimed to stand for limited government is increasingly embracing the coercive use of law to commandeer a culture it fears it has lost. It’s too early to judge the campaign’s effects yet, but all the activity offers an instructive window into where the energy on the American right is today. Many even target university education, which traditionally enjoys much wider latitude to discuss politically controversial ideas. According to Sachs, every single Republican-controlled state where the legislature is currently in session is considering a new “ educational gag order” bill.
On the state level, there’s been a push to pass “critical race theory” bans that constrain teachers’ speech and “educational transparency” rules that sometimes go as far as putting teachers on publicly accessible webcams and forcing them to seek parental permission if students try to join LGBTQ clubs. On the local level, the effort manifests in parent- and activist-led drives to remove books from shelves and curriculums.
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It’s about not discussing them at all,” says Jeffrey Sachs, a professor at Acadia University who tracks free speech in education. It’s not about discussing ideas objectively.
“You’re seeing really powerful movements under way to constrain expression.
The rise of book bans, in their view, is the tip of a deeper iceberg: a growing movement on the right to use the levers of local and state governance to control teachers and push an ideologically slanted vision of what children should learn about American culture, society, and history. But free speech advocates insist the new campaigns are worth paying attention to - and worrying about. Viewed in a broader national context - there are roughly 99,000 public K-12 schools in the US - these numbers are still far too low to describe as a national crisis. “Parents, activists, school board officials and lawmakers around the country are challenging books at a pace not seen in decades,” the New York Times reported last month. If you’ve been following the news recently, you’ve likely seen headlines about an escalating push to ban books in schools across the country.īe it the removal of the Holocaust graphic novel Maus from a Tennessee school district’s eighth-grade curriculum or attempts to yank classics like The Handmaid’s Tale from library shelves, incidents of grassroots (and mostly conservative) pressure against schools to control the materials children can access have seemingly grown in frequency and intensity.Īccording to a new American Library Association report, there were 330 “book challenges” in the fall of 2021, an uptick from the same periods in recent years.
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