Banning Books? Everyone Is a Censor
A version of this commentary appeared in the Columbia Daily Tribune.
How do you feel about book-banning? This question was recently posed at a meeting of about 50 educators. When the question went out to the audience, you could hear the groans rising. The questioner, a librarian, was considering putting a “Banned Books” display in the library. As you can imagine, the educators were all for this. Then something curious happened. In a matter of seconds, the very educators who had voiced strong opposition to the banning of books themselves became book-banners.
Hearing the response to her question, the librarian was heartened. She shared her thoughts on the display and mentioned an example—Skippyjon Jones. Released in 2003, Skippyjon Jones was an immediate hit. It featured a loveable Siamese cat who thought he was a Chihuahua. In 2004, the book won the E.B. White Read Aloud Award from The Association of Booksellers for Children. I began teaching first grade shortly after Skippyjon Jones was released. My students loved it. They would often repeat the refrain from the book, “Yip, yippee, yippito! My name is Skippy Skippito!”
Fast-forward to 2018 and the book was listed as the eighth-most-challenged book by the American Library Association. Finding the book’s portrayal of Hispanics and stereotypes of Latinos objectionable, many have sought to remove the book from public school classrooms.
When that librarian mentioned the book to her audience of educators, I don’t think she expected what happened. The mood turned. The groans of disapproval of “bans” turned to voices saying, “Well . . . that book is problematic.”
You have heard that everyone is a critic. What you may not realize is that everyone is also a censor. Every person believes objectionable or problematic materials should not be given to unsuspecting youth in our public school classrooms. We just define what is objectionable or problematic in different ways.
In recent years, conservatives have been labeled as “book banners” for attempting to keep books that display sexual acts or that teach children about gender ideology from the classroom. The use of the phrase “book banning” is effective rhetorically, but it is not really accurate. The individuals organizing at school board meetings or in state houses are hardly seeking to ban books. Rather, they are seeking to keep some books from being purchased by government organizations for consumption in public institutions. They are seeking to censor what is being presented to children.
This notion of censorship is not a right or left issue and it is not new. Americans have long fought over the content that would be taught and the books that would be presented to children. We’ve fought over these issues for many reasons. Chief among them are that some materials are simply not appropriate for children, and that education has the ability to shape a child’s mind.
Censoring is a rational human response to objectionable material. It is something we do for ourselves, and it is something we do for our own children on a daily basis. Censoring becomes an issue in the public sphere because of how we have chosen to organize our public education system. We compel parents to send their children to school and we condition their receipt of government funding upon them sending their children to public schools. We place parents in a winner-take-all system to determine whose values and whose books are presented in the classroom. As long as we continue to organize our school system in this way, “book banning” will continue to be an issue.
Of course, the system does not have to be organized this way. We could create a system of public education in which parents are empowered to send their children to the school of their choice. We could choose to create a system where parents in the same school district could choose to send their children to different schools based on the quality of education and the alignment of the curricula to each family’s values. Strangely, the very people opposed to “banning books” are often the very people who stand in the way of proposals for educational freedom.
Sections of “Banned Books” may make great library displays or they may help drive sales at bookstores, but the fact is censoring books is emblematic of our public education system. It is not a flaw of the system; it is the design. As the educators I witnessed demonstrated, we are all censors. The question is, are we ready to do something about it? Are we ready to change the system?