The gist: Books that were previously available but removed due to pressure from outside (or other teachers)
So I think one thing to keep in mind is that books added or removed from shelves based on the editorial choices of the library staff is not considered a book ban - and it's why books like Mein Kampf or Lolita don't also show up on these lists despite being very intentionally kept off the shelves by librarians.
Oftentimes school districts or libraries already have a system in place where offensive or non age-appropriate books can have restrictions placed on it based on parent or student feedback.
All this to say I think it makes book bans a bit muddier - in some instances they might be legitimate pushback on aggressive editorialization by librarians. But in most instances, they are self-obviously performative and unnecessary.
It seems like they would count those books as being banned if they had a means for gathering the information.
"Since 2021, there have been numerous accounts of quiet removals of books in libraries and classrooms by teachers and librarians. School districts have started issuing preemptive bans through 'do not buy' lists, barring titles from ever entering their libraries. . . . Therefore, PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans is best thought of as a minimum count of book banning trends. This is a similar conclusion to that of the American Library Association, which routinely estimates that its counts reflect only a portion of the true number of books banned in schools."
You could easily make those arguments on the book bans themselves.
One common argument I've seen floated in these conversations is that whatever this you call this behavior, it's not that bad because there are lots of other means to access the banned books.
But if that's the case - why bother in the first place? Is it all just performative virtue signaling that has no measurable effect on children's means to access these books? If not, shouldn't we be interrogating their reasoning?
By this definition, The Bible is the most "banned book" across the country, even though it's probably the most consequential piece of literature ever written.
This continuous doublespeak is even more humorous considering the site has actual shopping links to every 'banned book'.
Just because you can find those books online or elsewhere doesn't mean that the rulings to ban them from school libraries isn't about trying to restrict access to that information.
If you had a trans child?
Trans yourself?
fortunately "trans ideology" is a nonexistent boogeyman made up by whatever vile youtube videos or FOX news you're watching, so there's no worry about such books existing
You are literally spouting right wing book banner talking points.
"Suitable for children." Uh huh. According to your pastor.
The problem is that the definition of "things that are inappropriate for kids" brought up by book-banners is almost always heavily inspired by religion. A book containing graphical violence and sex, like the Bible? Totally okay! A book containing casual day-to-day life, like mentioning in passing that little Johnny next door has two dads? Somehow completely inappropriate.
>The comment contains no judgements on what should be included or excluded from their point of view.
Let's be real. The types of people who bother to bring up the supposed hypocrisy of it are very much in favor of keeping the erotica, and may very well be in favor of pushing out religious texts because of "the science" or some shit. I know some people have said that they had trouble finding a bible in their library on YouTube. Somehow I doubt it was merely a case of them all being checked out either. If you ever catch a video of the people at the top of the American Library Association talking about these "book ban" issues it will all start to make sense.
How much erotica are you seeing in the list linked above? Maybe a few could be kind of misconstrued for it, if someone was interpreting them with active hostility, but the far more obvious theme that ties them together is dealing with "heavy" themes in general - mental illness, discrimination, abuse, prostitution, suicide. Especially books that are overt in their themes and/or make the "wrong" conclusions in the eyes of the censors. You just set the rules for the argument by just filing all of that away as erotica, while most of it is anything but.
> I've never seen a religious scripture that fell into the category of erotica
That's because the hypocrisy that people argue about tends to concern things way worse than just some plain erotica. With their millennia-old standards for morality, religious texts from most religions often feature and endorse horrific acts and social standards that would without a doubt be instantly censored in schools much like the books above, if they weren't religious.
> Let's be real. The types of people who bother to bring up the supposed hypocrisy of it are very much in favor of keeping the erotica, and may very well be in favor of pushing out religious texts because of "the science" or some shit
"Being real" in this case seems to be a way of making a leading argument. I am on the side of those "types of people", and I know many more like that. The vast majority of people hold the stance of minimum book censorship, if at all possible. While I disagree with many religious books on most levels, censoring them would be equally misguided and pointless. At this point, they're important historical texts that frame a lot of how our society works. Anyone who wishes to access them should be able to do so, as should be the case with most other information.
> I know some people have said that they had trouble finding a bible in their library on YouTube
I don't know if YouTube content, especially from people who no doubt were looking for this specific conclusion, is enough to convince me that the most printed document in existence is suddenly impossible to find nowadays.
> Somehow I doubt it was merely a case of them all being checked out either
This is the crux of your argument, and you leave it up to subjective doubting? How many libraries have banned religious books as policy, rather than just having them vaguely be unavailable at some specific point in time?
Every day, hundreds if not thousands of these books are given away for free, on a range of anything from charity to forcing them down people's throats. The argument for this extreme of a level of anti-Christian persecution and censorship in the most religious country in the West isn't looking very good.
I honestly don't have time to go do a bunch of research on 52 random books I'm definitely not going to read. All I can tell you for sure is that many of these books are inappropriate for children, and I'd object to any book with sex scenes being in any public school library. I have seen people give damning reviews, including quotes and photos of graphic content, from books they wanted removed from school libraries, and I was inclined to agree with them. I'm not even a Christian, but I want to pay for that even less than copies of random religious texts.
>I am on the side of those "types of people", and I know many more like that.
I am not going to give a blanket endorsement to LGBT in this way. I believe in live and let live, more or less, but I believe many of these people are more evangelical than any religion at this point. Anyway, on the subject of injecting their "representation" into everything, even content for prepubescent children, I am very opposed.
>The vast majority of people hold the stance of minimum book censorship, if at all possible.
I hope this is true, but I am not so sure these days.
>Anyone who wishes to access them should be able to do so, as should be the case with most other information.
At risk of going off on a tangent: As much as I love libraries and books, I don't believe in "information wants to be free" type rhetoric. People need to be paid for their work one way or another.
>I don't know if YouTube content, especially from people who no doubt were looking for this specific conclusion, is enough to convince me that the most printed document in existence is suddenly impossible to find nowadays.
I never said that it was hard to find in general. I said that some people reported that their libraries did not have these bog standard books.
>How many libraries have banned religious books as policy, rather than just having them vaguely be unavailable at some specific point in time?
As I said, I only heard some anecdotes. I believe this is still probably a rare occurrence but I can't prove one way or another. I mention it mainly so people can look out for it, not to prove anything.
>Every day, hundreds if not thousands of these books are given away for free, on a range of anything from charity to forcing them down people's throats.
Nobody is actually forced to own and read a bible, unless they are trying to do it to fit in with the religious folk. I consider that voluntary.
>The argument for this extreme of a level of anti-Christian persecution and censorship in the most religious country in the West isn't looking very good.
I personally witnessed some normal inoffensive Christian content censored on Facebook a couple of years ago as if it was gore. There is definitely a sizeable group of people which openly detests Christians and hopes to see the religion die, even though most Christians are very nice people and the religion is very important for Western values. Meanwhile, we have Islamic apologists hoping to excuse terrorism and continue importing millions of highly fertile, culturally incompatible invaders. The same people talking shit about Christian views on abortion will stick up for Muslims who hate all of us and want to take over, and LGBT, which the Muslims especially hate. Sometimes the absurdity of it all makes me suspect we live in a simulation.
Would you agree for the school to have the book "The Passing of the Great Race", a famously racist and white supremacist book in your school library?
I have absolutely no problem saying that bigots who insist that no books containing LGBT characters appear in libraries are bad people while also thinking that The Turner Diaries shouldn't be in public schools.
Is this a common stance? I thought it was more like, no books glorifying LGBT lifestyle or teaching it as if it’s not controversial and it’s just a fact of life (as proponents sincerely believe, of course, not saying no one is thinks it is a fact of life, that’s just the part that is controversial). I understand disagreeing with that, but it isn’t the same as opponents pushing for zero gay/etc characters period, right?
I haven’t been following this topic too closely though so I might be missing what people are screeching about on the right today.
She has a bisexual daughter who has attempted suicide twice. She has told her daughter that she’d be better off dead than bi.
Also I’m very sorry if there are books that contain gay characters where there aren’t constant asides reminding the reader that these people are going to hell. The “gay lifestyle” is just gay people existing.
What is an LGBT lifestyle?
My life before and after discovering the nature of my queerness is remarkably similar, though with a fair few more relationships and a lot less anguish afterwards.
The implication of "lifestyle" usually being "ability to exist in a society without any major obstacles due to being LGBT", "ability to receive true healthcare related to being LGBT", "ability to be legally recognized and accommodated as a result of it" or "ability to express your queerness in public without being seen as the villain".
Imagine somebody getting upset for glorifying a straight lifestyle. Funny stuff.
https://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/book/the-ad...
The older I get, the more I think that there is wisdom in the words of Col. Sherburn on the cowardice of the average person.
By the way, I wonder if HN is aware of whose alt account this is. If they are, I wonder if they would punish the original poster for issuing threats on an anonymous account. I...admit that I don't have high hopes, but I live to be surprised.
> Grant became a part of popular culture in 1920s America. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald made a lightly disguised reference to Grant in The Great Gatsby. In the book, the character Tom Buchanan reads a book called The Rise of the Colored Empires by "this man Goddard", a combination of Grant and his colleague Lothrop Stoddard. ...
> ... "Everybody ought to read it", the character said. "The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."
Personally I think using banned for "actively prevented from accessing in ways other books are not" makes plenty of sense even if you can effectively circumvent those attempts somehow.
The strict meaning that people seem to want to apply in here does not seem particularly useful to me. Almost no books have ever been banned by that standard, but there is a clearly organized movement in the US to remove all reference to queerness from public life. Flexible on nomenclature here but that context is very important.
I think if librarians were buying "straight" books with the same explicit and adult content and putting them in elementary, middle, and high schools, the same parents would be complaining about those too.
Remember that the parents are deciding for other parents what appears in libraries.
My second point was that since all these "banned" books are still available for sale; getting on a banned book list is just a tactic to sell more books. This list even has affiliate links to the books. Which make the whole page click bait.
You can call it a different word if you want I guess. But I'm absolutely baffled that people are spending their time worrying about the word "banned" here. This shit is awful.
This thread is full of people falling over themselves trying to convince you that a book ban isn't actually a book ban, and whatever it happens to be isn't that big of a deal.
If the banning of books from libraries isn't a big deal - why is it being done in the first place? Is it just virtue signaling, or does it have a specific objective? If it has a specific objective, isn't that objective worth interrogating instead of brushing off as not a big deal because the book is still available through other means?
The narrative is "look at these liberals forcing sex on children." Parents go to school board meetings and read passages ripped from context as lurid eroticism to rile up their neighbors. If normies go along with this "think of the children" stuff then it becomes a foothold to the next steps. We've seen this trans people, where bigots have successfully converted "this is about girl's sports" into policies banning healthcare and safe bathroom use.
And it's very much not the writers of books with LGBT content.
I can understand why the real culprits might want to deflect attention from their moral failings onto others, and why pointing out the facts might make them very, very angry.
But it's going to have to be done at some point.
It's always strange to me when the concern is "sexually explicit material" and not "violently explicit material".
The work is never done, after removing the books with practical tutorials, blue prints and historical revisionism you always continue to have a candidate at the top of the list. The work that remains now are all fictional books that portray an uncomfortable reality.
After those are all gone the new reality will again have a most terrible book. The work is never done.
If not, it would make sense that Texas made the news because it's out of the ordinary.
The only books I can think of that are actually banned, as in it's against the law to obtain, in the US would be like a B2 bomber capability manual or some other classified documentation.
The Pentagon Papers case says that, once revealed, classified information can be published.
How about dangerous information. Want to know how to make a fusion bomb? Start at https://www.atomicarchive.com/science/fusion/index.html. More detailed schematics are easy to find.
All that said, I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
But carrying it is unlikely to be against the law either.
Pen clearly defines what they consider a ban. Hustler would not meet the definition (hint: it's not because its a magazine).
If "filtering content for children" is not banning books, then why is "filtering content for adults" banning books?
> By this definition, The Bible is the most "banned book" across the country
According to the source the high score is 147. Has the Bible been banned 148 times or more in the US?
You can argue banning or filtering some books for kids is the right thing to do, but the obvious question is then: what books and why?
Seems like you are fighting a strawman.
to forbid (= refuse to allow) something, especially officially
The school won't kick you out for having the book, but they won't buy it.
> PEN America defines a school book ban as any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by lawmakers or other governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished. Diminished access is a form of censorship and has educational implications that extend beyond a title’s removal. Accessibility forms the core of PEN America’s definition of a school book ban and emphasizes the multiple ways book bans infringe on the rights of students, professional educators, and authors. It is important to recognize that books available in schools, whether in a school or classroom library, or as part of a curriculum, were selected by librarians and educators as part of the educational offerings to students. Book bans occur when those choices are overridden by school boards, administrators, teachers, or politicians, on the basis of a particular book’s content.
In particular it's when the decisions of the professionals are being overruled for political purposes.
It is particularly clear when reading the list, many of these books are children/young adults books which have won highest national and international awards, but somehow they are "age inappropriate"?
You keep saying this all over this thread, can you please tell me how you are reaching this conclusion?
I have linked you to at least one entire state (covering 40+ school districts) where what you are saying is completely false.
Typically, if a school bans something, it also means that the children are not allowed to bring the banned thing onto the school premises.
Even if you really dial in your definition of "consequential", ie. the amount of stagnated technological and societal progress and murder as a result of the Bible's adherents' efforts, this seems an absurd claim.
Most consequential piece of literature is likely the Plimpton 322 or Euclid's Elements or The Epic Of Gilgamesh. The Bible is an embarrassing footnote.
I'd agree with limiting access based on age, but a lot of these laws have a binary if not outright ban on library access.
What's appropriate to a 10, 12, 14, and 16 year old is pretty broad as these kids mature fast in a few short years. I see no reason why any 16 year old should be restricted from any book.
The first time I tried to check out one of those very adult books the librarian called my parents and asked if it was OK. My parents said "Yes. Let him have whatever he wants." They made a note in my account and the next day they let me have have whatever I wanted.
If that hadn't happened I would be a very different, and much dumber, person now.
I don't understand what the issue is with just asking the parents?
I suspect that most of the people responsible for these "bans" don't want that to happen because some parents will approve of things they don't. Most of this really IS an attempted ban rather than just "appropriate age related content" issue. They don't want to control what THEIR kids can see. They want to control what YOUR kids can see.
The notion that the school board would simply ask a parent, then deal with the parents from kid A complaining that they read a book checked out by kid B is out there.
We run our schools to a lowest common denominator system.
We had a better system once (maybe only in this one way). We can do it again.
Call me when you're arrested or fined for buying/selling any book in US.
That still doesn't address my original question. Is there historic precedent for this type of micromanaging of school libraries (if you're adamant that we shouldn't use the B word) that most of us would still agree with today? Because many of the books on the list seem more likely to follow the path of eventual school classics like The Grapes of Wrath or To Kill a Mockingbird than they are to continue to be banned decades into the future.
What in the world are you talking about? Why are you spouting a bunch of bigotry that isn't relevant to anything?
Call me when you're arrested or fined for buying/selling any book in US.
How are children supposed to develop into adults, if they are denied reading about the experiences of others?
What there actually are, are books that schools refuse to carry in their libraries because they don't think the content is appropriate for children. I would assume this happens in every country.
You are just fundamentally wrong on the facts here. This list is specifically books that were removed from libraries due to outside forces. I'm not worried about school librarians deciding that a book's content makes it unsuitable for their students. These are situations in which parents or government officials are telling the school to remove a book already present.
https://pen.org/book-bans/book-bans-frequently-asked-questio...
Yes. This is normally done by a school librarian, who has extensive training in curating collections, and who is hired by the school board.
Because it's their explicit job function. Librarians aren't hired to watch over unchanging collections of books like cryptkeepers. They have budgets to buy books with.
Even if the librarian (or in some cases, even if the school district) wants to place the book on the shelves, they are not allowed to.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/b/banned-books/_/N-rtm
It makes you wonder what books Barnes and Noble has banned from being sold in their stores.
So if a librarian goes to a conference and learns, "hey we need to remove these books from the lirbary because they are bigoted/racist/problematic" and they do so, that is not a book ban. But if parents say, "hey this book is not appropriate for our kids, this should not be in a school library", and they raise hell to get it removed, that is a book ban. The whole framing is dumb.
You also won't see The Passing of the Great Race in the list.
Either way, this is a silly argument. All these “banned” books are also readily available in your public library - they’re pop lit, your local library likely has more copies of Maas than all the Greek writers of antiquity combined.
Edit: on page 2 of 11, I have already counted 62 copies of Sarah J Maas book. As an institution for serving the public entertainment, my library system is doing great.
Search for “deaccessioning” and “equity based weeding” and you will find all the information you could wish for. The classics are being thrown into dumpsters or pulped to make room for more computers and Sarah J Maas. In one particularly egregious Canadian case, all books published before 2008 were destroyed. In many cases this is politically driven.
Perhaps you know how the use to work, but not how they do now. It’s very grim. Many invaluable niche works, particularly of local history but also of technical subjects, have now been destroyed forever by librarians. The assumption too is that everything is probably digitized somewhere so it doesn’t even matter. Cultural and political and funding concerns as actual literacy has declined have completely subsumed that original purpose of libraries.
> You haven't checked, don't know how to check, or don't know what a "local library SYSTEM" is.
There’s no need to call me a liar. I read quite a lot and end up buying nearly all my books nowadays because the library system rarely had even very notable older books, but I still check. It takes about 30 seconds to type into the collection search bar. I did, in fact, look before I wrote that comment. Perhaps you should have not been so sure when you wrote your original comment that it was definitely there. Meanwhile, Maas has at least several dozen and I would suppose a few hundred copies of her books in the system. So, according to you it’s no big deal if the book is in the public library - well I can assure you Maas is several times more likely to be in any local public library than Hitler, so it sounds like there’s nothing to be concerned about. Your comment is entirely applicable to these Maas books: “ its not there because it is readily available in many US public and college libraries. If it isn't in your institution's collection your librarian will happily help you order it from from a nearby one.”
That's not banned...I wonder why?
Bigots want there to be no visible LGBT people in society. "Your child will encounter a gay person someday" is not an argument they care about because they would also like to ensure that gay people cannot be visible in other parts of society.
I don't understand the logic of banning these books, do they act like the internet doesn't exist? Kids will find this information, I found plenty of information about being gay 20ish years ago in high school.
Then again being short sited is one of their strong suits.
(Not downplaying banned books, I just can't understand thinking it is a good idea)
I am against the banning of books from purchase or from public libraries, however banning books in schools is not that. It is gatekeeping this information from young and impressionable minds, just like we do with movies, games, drugs, all sorts of things. Things that may have negative consequences on developing minds.
You may disagree with what books are banned or why, but allowing unsupervised exposure of elementary aged children to sexually explicit and graphically depicted books such as Gender Queer is not appropriate. If a child wants access to this, their parent or adult can buy it for them or rent it from the public library.
That's great idea, many stores have them!
This is not about bookstores but about school. So then, would you put that bookshelf in a second grade class. How early do kids need to hear about "Five troubled teenagers fall into prostitution as they search for freedom, safety, community, family, and love". I mean, a lot of those kids still believe in Santa maybe telling them about teenage prostitutes is a bit early.
My local bookstore proudly features a table of "banned books" right at the entrance. It's a pretty good advertisement!
Book bans are not designed to stop people that know about these books and the ideas they contain. They know that those people will still find them and read them.
> I found plenty of information about being gay 20ish years ago in high school.
Lots of kids didn't and they don't know they didn't and that is the point.
But (well until the last couple of years) you would have still seen "different" people on tv and in movies.
And I get that the point is to make it so the kids are not being exposed to different ideas and beliefs. I am just struggling to understand how that is actually a realistic idea in todays world.
Mostly books about young people confronting the problems facing young people
A window into the minds of adults. A distorted window, I hope, or there is no hole for those adults
Protect children? Stop abusing, punishing and condemning them for being children. But no, ban books that might give them clues on coping
What outrageous behavior, bless the librarians
...By which I mean people should be free to speak about it and to vote it in whatever way they deem. See, the words we use have meanings, and stretching them to benefit our agenda is a shitty thing to do.
My journey into professional software development was due to the efforts of the GNU organization that provided high quality compilers and tools along with a legal structure to promote the creation of more free software. The innovation was that code is speech and is protected by the first amendment (in the US). I have watched the software community devolve into just corrupt thievery due to the silicon valley "as long as I get rich, I am good" culture. That culture is seeping into every aspect of our social lives leading to deep enshittification. Monopolization of the means of artistic expression due to financialization is ruining everything.
Wait, seriously?! I mean that's basically teen drama levels of tame, IIRC.
> 12. The Handmaid’s Tale
Well, that's a bit meta.
Now, it seems to be be more about representation: "Do we want to say our school supports the ideas in this book?"
I'm not defending book banning, but people seem to treat book banning as if it's still the 1950s, and schools are really censoring information in any sort of meanginful way. Instead, all the schools are doing is taking a stand and saying "this book does not represent us."
Mind you, I still think this is bad, but I'm a bit baffled why people treat this topic the way they do.
Parents should be the ultimate authority on what kind of media their child consumes, and they should be responsible. Afterall legally children are basically an extension of the adult who is responsible for them
For those unaware, this book, and the ensuing Netflix original, was one colossal
> gee, who could have possibly anticipated this?
The book is about a depressed teenage girl who commits suicide after mailing boxes of recordings to the peers whom she felt wronged her, where she outlines the ways in which they are responsible for her "unaliving" herself. The book glamorizes teenage suicide, specifically of white teenage girls (as for reasons unclear, Jay Asher just had to disregard "write what you know" in favor of making the protagonist be both female and not Jewish), achieving a kind of retribution and redemption through suicide.
Not only did this book get published and mass marketed to youths, Netflix actually greenlit it, despite warnings from experts, and after decades of the news media exercising extreme caution and tact over reporting on teen suicide, given the well-established risks of copycat contagion. The result?
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/apr/30/teen-su...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6817407/
Even reporting on adult suicides can be dicey: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
The principle is still bad.
Popular banned books like Lolita, mein kampf are not here, but they are also not in U.S. schools. There are also no books listed here that schools definitely (for good reason) do not have, like COVID denialism, cult books, etc.
I'm happy to be proven wrong in the comments though, this is just from my cursory look at how they define it.
Honest question: Are those books banned in schools?
The books that "require banning" are good children's books. Isn't that the point?
For some reason the First Amendment is a lot more negotiable for the American public than the second, so banning books will probably never be as politically intractable as banning guns in the US.
This doesn't seem to be a particularly large problem.
That is not a rebuttal to your point -- I don't have a guess on whether or not the chilling effect is significant. I'm just noting there are follow-on effects to be considered.
There are much worse, much bigger problems and we need to constantly be reminding people of how big issues actually are. Book bannings are concerning but what is the size of the actual impact? I see this issue more of as an embarrassment for a handful of schools and boards who are bowing to moralizing fools, people are acting like they're afraid of an escalation to Fahrenheit 451 when we really should be mocking the book banners for their foolishness instead of being afraid of them.
This is far from the only issue suffering from a lack of sense of scale.
And it all started with people complaining about books in the library.
Probably also worth asking if this problem is really independent, or if it's a facet of larger, more clearly damaging trends.
This does on account for soft bans like undisclosed do not buy lists. No need to ban what you are not allowed to buy.
This is like saying "there are only 147 cities and towns who voted for X while 15,000 towns didn't, therefore X is very unpopular" without taking into account how many voters live in those cities/towns.
At least Iowa has largely went the other direction recently by removing it and Maus from absurd book bans.
It is well accepted that the lab-leak theory is highly improbable, and all of the evidence is that it came from the wet markets.
Mhmm, and what about when those parents are wrong? Does the state not have a duty to educate people even when parents think that the moon landing is a hoax or plate tectonics aren't real?
When your parent is an insane person, sometimes a school is your only protection.
But so many conservatives find this unconscionable. How dare you! Parents can never be wrong!
The point of public schools is to make an educated populace. Not a populace that only knows what their parents want them to know.
Yes, this means that your kids might learn something you disagree with! The horror! Something like "America is a republic, not a democracy" like I was taught, or "slavery wasn't that bad" like a lot in the south are taught.
Ah, turns out they never really cared that people were getting taught things their parents didn't agree with. Only when children are taught things contrary to fundamentalist christian beliefs.
The point of education is so that your child can see multiple narratives and make their own choices, so they can learn to evaluate narratives and figure out which might have substance and which might just be nonsense. But the people who start their children into church before they can form full sentences really seem to hate that idea.
I wonder why...
It's just so bizarre to make an argument (A very valid one!) about freedom of information by openly lying to the public.
https://pen.org/book-bans/book-bans-frequently-asked-questio...
Librarians and teachers choose books, then some external party forces them to be removed. If you don't like the term "banned", choose a term you like better.
Which book was that?
You can look into it, if you're curious! Some of these books are indeed banned from schools (even if they want to stock it!), by state-level law no less! It's not a curation choice.
Sorry, I'll edit my comment to be more clear. It is illegal for school libraries to stock it, even if they (teachers, the district, the parents, etc.) want it to be carried.
As a reminder for readers, the title of the article contains "in U.S. schools". It is probably a safe assumption to use that context for the comments in this thread.
Is it like if you bring the book to school you’ll be sent home or something?
Most schools (at least in Idaho) have libraries attached to the school.
[1] https://www.acluidaho.org/app/uploads/2024/05/final_2024_05_...
There are common themes among all of them. All of them, your average parent, would rather their children not be exposed to in school. This list is more like "what should/shouldn't be acceptable for kids and teens". This is hardly a ban. It's at best parental control. But selling it as a ban is key to outrage culture and delivering their opinions about the current administration. Nothing is stopping a parent from purchasing these books for their child. Nothing is stopping them from finding them as a PDF, or at a local or online reseller. Pretending this is "taboo" information is an extremely poor attempt to hide political bikeshedding.
Redefining a term that is explicitly defined in the article. Ten yard penalty.
> All of them, your average parent, would rather their children not be exposed to in school.
Bullshit.
I tried to present a different opinion here and not flame anyone in my post. But since you're being inflammatory I feel it necessary to call out your terminally online sickness.
The reddit/HN pseudo-intellectual far left navel gazing view of the world is wildly uncommon in real life. Sorry to break it to you but you have to realize normal, well adjusted, people have concerns about books detailing teenage sex and rape. If you don't, you should probably get your head checked. The authors of these books are likely similarly sick in the head.
It is simply a Russell conjugation: librarians curate books; parents and school boards ban books.
Personally, I don't trust librarians or school boards, and I put a lot of work into curating reading material for my own children. Many of the books I value are out-of-print, or unavailable in any public library, whereas almost all these so-called "banned books" are available in most public libraries. So yeah, these lists get a giant eye-roll from me.
Your school not stocking books you want is not a ban. It’s the prerogative of the institution to choose how it shapes minds. It cannot avoid taking on some angle, since any incomplete collection is an editorial choice.
>Your school not stocking books you want is not a ban. It’s the prerogative of the institution to choose how it shapes minds.
At least some of these books are banned from schools by state-level law, not because the school district chose to not stock it.
The one I was referring to:
https://www.sltrib.com/news/education/2024/08/02/utah-book-b...
"The law, which went into effect July 1, requires that a book be removed from all public schools in the state if at least three school districts (or at least two school districts and five charter schools) determine it amounts to “objective sensitive material”"
It seems like there may be more similar laws, per sibling comment.
>Aren't there other books that are banned for legitimate reasons like hate speech and racial hate that aren't included here?
I don't know, and I'm not sure how it is related to my comment. I did not create the list in the article and I don't maintain any other list of banned books.
Would you want your kids reading Mein Kampf or The Passing of the Great Race? I wouldn't.
No, they are "prohibited in the school setting". You cannot bring it with you.
https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/1069/BillText/er/...
The bill is all about pronouns, heterosexuality, abstinence, and getting books out of libraries on those grounds.
https://pen.org/book-bans/book-bans-frequently-asked-questio...
Special accommodations are made for students. Parents can ask for their child not to participate in activities they deem inappropriate. I see this happen all of the time during Halloween events. It would be nice if Christian conservatives would do the same.
I sure am glad that there is an Objectively Correct set of books children should be exposed to, unaffected by issues of identity, politics, or morality, and it's just a matter of applying dispassionate expertise to discover it.
And of course, that this is what librarians are doing, and not letting their personal beliefs interfere.
But then everyone knows this, and I don't for a second believe you or anyone else thinks school librarians make decisions entirely based on universal (i.e. not specific to any country, ethnic group, or political persuasion) dispassionate principles. You're only pretending to to win an argument, then you'll go right back to believing the opposite, and call for libraries to be "decolonized" [1].
I guess we're lucky libraries are expert and objective now, unlike how they were 3 years ago when they were biased and needed decolonizing. Except the ones that haven't decolonized yet, of course. Those librarians' expertise and judgment can still be questioned.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/narrative-expansion...
The reference you posted is about collection management at libraries London School of Economics in England. England has different history with respect to colonization than the US. A sordid history in-fact. We are also talking books for adults not children under 18.
The US itself is was decolonization project. I hope you know that colonialism is rarely judged a good thing in modern scholarship.
Yes, the difference is the political activism of librarians is institutionalized [0]. You don't view the absence of Jared Taylor's "White Identity", or any similar book, from school libraries, as "suppressing societal critiques", do you? Why, because it's done quietly and tacitly?
It's so funny seeing the same people complaining how every institution is systemically racist or whatever-ist (including math [1,2] - I made sure links are for the US, since apparently that is such a special case that critiques of institutions in even the most closely related countries are completely inapplicable to it), then turn around and claim that "no, this institution that does what I like is beyond politics, driven by pure expertise", even in a field as fuzzy and political as child education.
> The reference you posted is about collection management at libraries London School of Economics in England.
Thank you for this uselessly reductive interpretation. While yes of course libraries in those other, lesser countries are politicized and in need of correction, libraries in the US are objective and beyond reproach - unless [3] that [4] reproach [5] comes [6] from [7] the [8] left [9,10,11].
When activists lobby to change institutions how I like, this is good and necessary - those institutions are systemically racist, colonialist, and biased!
When activists lobby to change institutions how you like [12], this is bad and political - those institutions are dispassionate, apolitical, objective experts!
[0] https://libnews.umn.edu/event/librarians-and-social-justice-...
[1] https://www.clrn.org/why-is-mathematics-racist/
[2] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/modern-mathematic...
[3] What It Means to Decolonize the Library - https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/l...
[4] Interpreting decolonization in academic libraries - https://www.ala.org/news/2021/12/interpreting-decolonization...
[5] Decolonizing the CSW Library - https://library.csw.org/home/decolonize
[6] Taking Steps to Decolonize Library Collections, Policies, and Services - https://serials.atla.com/proceedings/article/download/3336/4...
[7] Over the last decade, there have been increasing calls to “decolonize” the archive. - https://whc.yale.edu/what-colonial-archive
[8] Diversifying the Curriculum & Decolonizing the Collection - https://blogs.library.duke.edu/blog/2022/04/11/diversifying-...
[9] Remembering the Howard University Librarian Who Decolonized the Way Books Were Catalogued - https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/remembering-howard-un...
[10] Diversifying Collections - https://www.wocandlib.org/features/2022/5/11/diversifying-co...
[11] Anti-Racist Collections Workbook: A Tool for Building Inclusive Library Collections - https://www.journals.ala.org/index.php/lrts/article/view/855...
[12] I don't actually like it, I just don't fool myself into thinking what librarians are doing is any different. If anything, it is worse, since it is invisible and unchallenged.
Parents (customers) lobbying school administrators about what should be in the school library = bad, evil.
Yeah, no.
The definition you gave for banning books does narrow it down a bit though. Restriction on the publication, sale, or importation isn't a ban, but possession is. Ah. I guess a book is only banned if you face legal consequences for owning it after purchase during the very limited window that it may appear on bookshelves. In that case, I can't say for certain that Australia, Canada, Germany, and New Zealand bans books, but I can say that I would not want to be in possession of certain types of books in these countries. The definition of 'banned books' gets a little murky here though, is the inevitable police detention and interrogation due to the possession of the books themselves or rather obscenity/hate speech/Nazism/terrorism/drug laws? Does it count if the detention and interrogation occurs after an unrelated search of your property? Is a book only banned if it is confiscated from your possession? Does it count if you win your court case?
Which leaves the only Western nations that fit such a definition as being Austria and the United Kingdom, which do objectively criminalise the possession of banned books.
Banned makes sense to me as shorthand though sure it's not quite exactly accurate. Suggest me an alternative?
EDIT: This was a sincere and I thought pretty neutral question but I have clearly touched a nerve with this. Everyone seems to be having a great time.
Prevented to be stocked? Library removed?
What should we call it when you can legally acquire the book, read and share it with other people with no concern from the law or authorities whatsoever? Do you think the correct word for this is "banned"?
"Unavailable" ?
Or am I completely wrong, and Jared Taylor's "White Identity" is available in every school library, explaining its absence from "banned" book lists?
[1] 'Banned' meaning not using taxpayer money to make them available to schoolchildren.
I now wonder whether this is great (freedom and so on) or terrible (manipulation and so on)
At first glance this is a useless list