No Good Can Ever Come from Banning Books

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Commissioner of Education Manny Diaz Jr. have been at the forefront of a movement to remove controversial books and “woke” concepts from public schools. Collage: Inés Barragán; book image from PBS.

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By INÉS BARRAGÁN

Fascism is on the rise in America. Increasingly, the First Amendment is being violated, as is evident from the growing movement to ban books. 

Book banning isn’t new in America. In fact, parents have always fought to retain control over their children’s education. Today, however, we’re seeing families campaigning on a national scale with the help and financial muscle of Republican organizations, collaborating with their state governments to ban books, especially those about LGBTQ+ and POC issues.

According to PEN America, the Covid-19 pandemic led to an increase in organizations advocating for parental rights, with 50+ groups throughout the U.S. currently working on pulling books with topics that go against their conservative agendas from school libraries and curricula. 

These organizations have worked on placing conservative board members in numerous school districts. According to the New York Times, one of these groups, Moms of Liberty, has won 272 seats for conservatives and are the majority in districts across New Jersey, Indiana, North and South Carolina, and Florida. These boards are essentially in charge of establishing the district’s curricula and deciding which books to remove. 

Florida’s state government, led by Ron DeSantis, is a leading supporter of the book-banning movement. Under the guise of standing against pornography and the exposure of other inappropriate subjects to minors, they’ve signed bills HB 1467 and 1557 into law, which according to the Times have strengthened the rights parents have in making educational decisions for their children while leaving the implementation process vague on purpose, allowing districts to interpret the list however they want. 

HB 1467 demands that school districts reveal a list of their instructional materials, while HB 1557 (what critics call the “Don’t Say Gay” bill) bans classrooms from teaching about sexual orientation or gender identity before 3rd grade. Governor DeSantis supports legislation that would extend those directives until 8th grade. 

The Florida state legislature has also implemented the Stop W.O.K.E. Act, which prohibits the teaching of certain theories (including Critical Race Theory) that are quintessential to the progressive movements of our time. Amongst the banned ideas are those that teach that a person is inherently racist based on their race or national origin, that a person is responsible for actions done in the past by members of their race or national origin and should feel guilt over it, and that communities that have enjoyed privilege in the past should renounce preferential treatment to help achieve a more equitable society. 

According to PEN America and DeSantis himself, Florida so far has banned 175 books deemed inappropriate from classrooms. The state also rejected an early version of the AP African-American Studies course on the grounds that the concepts in the curriculum violated the Stop W.O.K.E. Act and were too advanced for high school students. (DeSantis must have missed the memo that it’s a college-level class.)

Teachers have been spending hours scrambling to sort through their extensive libraries throughout the state and across Tennessee, Oklahoma, Utah, Texas, Arizona, Iowa, and Missouri, to protect their jobs and avoid legal punishment. 

It is hypocritical to promote a conservative political agenda while arguing that the progressive movement should not be allowed to do the same. Allowing teachers to express their beliefs only if they’re supported by the state government is anathema to the First Amendment, which proclaims that we all have the right to receive information and ideas. The Supreme Court in Board of Education v. Pico (1982) further affirmed this “right to receive.”

Children of all ages are entitled to academic freedom and the notion that truthfulness is determined through the exchange of multiple, conflicting ideas and views instead of an endorsement by the government or political organizations. It seems that the true indoctrination these days is coming from parents who are fearful that through public education their children will learn to form their own opinions. 

Diverse school libraries are necessary. Schools should be sanctuaries of knowledge that offer insight into all kinds of topics that a child may be interested in and benefit from. While students in elementary school may be too young to read about complex concepts like Critical Race Theory, middle schoolers and high schoolers should absolutely have the resources needed to enrich themselves intellectually. If a teenager is able to understand AP Physics then surely they must be capable of understanding and debating the idea that American society is structurally racist.

As much as this movement is said to protect vulnerable teens from “liberal propaganda,” it seems to prevent them from understanding topics that are necessary for university entrance, thus putting them in a disadvantageous position when compared to their peers. This indoctrination effect is magnified by social media, which is highly polarized. 

There’s nothing beneficial in enforcing only traditional views in children growing up in a modern world. And there’s never anything to be gained from banning books.