September 22-28 is banned books week. During this time, we are challenged as readers and writers to re-evaluate the pros and cons of banning books.
The American Library Association (ALA) reported a 65 percent increase in complaints about certain books on school and institute libraries since 2022. Already this year’s book banning reports have gone up like wildfire, with more than four-thousand reports from the ALA. This number is startling because the books being banned seem to express intense or dark feelings, personal experiences and political views, sexual abuse, bullying, slavery, suicide, drugs, and more—all things that are experienced in the world by our upcoming generation.
So why hide from it? Just because schools and universities pull these books from the shelves doesn’t make the real world threat of their topics go away.
Learning is all about opening your mind and expanding your views, and that is what schools and higher institutions are supposed to do. But how can they succeed if they are narrowing the literary field in which students are studying?
One of the top reasons for banning books, as stated in the First Amendment Museums’s article “How Do Books Get Banned?,” is sexual content. Yet sexual content can mean many things, such as groping, nudity, explicit descriptions and kissing. Many more reasons for banning books are listed, including offensive language, religious viewpoint, LGBTQIA+ content, violence, racism, use of illegal substances and “anti-family” content.
It is a hard sight for any reader to see books pulled from the shelves due to being undesirable by parents that are protecting their children from sensitive topics. What they are really doing is forcing them to live in a world where they may feel uncomfortable, unrecognized, or unseen and heard. What they are truly doing is keeping their children’s worldviews closed to the world. It’s no longer about protection. At this point, it is about the horrific use of censoring. Understandably, parents, teachers and school administrators are worried about what high schoolers and college students are learning and reading. Except, there is a difference between teaching them that some sensitive content is okay and simply exposing them to it. Resistance is on the move, as it should be.
In April, Iowa State University faced a lawsuit from several authors, teachers, and publishers saying that the banning of their books was unconstitutional for school libraries. The School Library Journal reported titles pulled from Iowa’s school shelves that included authors like Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, Margaret Atwood, and George Orwell, primarily for their sensitive content and themes. Iowa asserted their decision was a correct one, but the ruling judge sided with the publishers, authors and teachers. It was a win.
Hope is not lost.
As students and scholars, we have a duty to say when something is not right, and the first step is to educate ourselves on what is being banned, and why. Then we must ask ourselves, why shouldn’t students across all ages read a banned title? If there isn’t a reason, then we need to fight.
Everyone deserves to be able to read what they want. Without reading, there is no learning, and that is why we walk the halls of our schools and universities.
In Illinois, we are lucky enough to have a governor who made ours the first state to outlaw book bans. Other states, other schools and other students are not so lucky. We, students and faculty alike, should use banned books week to advocate for freedom of reading content and for educating others on handling sensitive content.