Banning Books Does Not Help Students

I first read Maus — a graphic novel about the Holocaust in which Nazis are portrayed as cats and Jewish victims are portrayed as mice — when I was 12 years old. For me, Maus was powerful. Author Art Spiegelman turned the horrific experiences of his own father, a Nazi concentration camp survivor, into a deeply personal and thought-provoking story. The portrayal of the story’s characters as talking animals helped me enter the harrowing narrative from an approachable perspective, although I was soon swept up in Spiegelman’s emotional, detailed writing. It was a serious, insightful read that taught me the importance of empathy, courage, and standing up in the face of tyranny. It has stayed with me ever since.

Yet the 10-member school board in McMinn County, Tennessee, unanimously voted to remove Maus from their school’s eighth-grade curriculum one day before it was scheduled to be taught in class. Board member Mike Cochran stated, “There’s nudity that’s not necessary,” and that the board’s desire to remove the book “had nothing to do with the Holocaust.”

Spiegelman called the board’s decision “daffily myopic.”

In some regards, this school board’s ban has been a futile effort. After being removed from McMinn County schools, Maus became the number one Amazon bestseller — 36 years after it was published; it also quickly sold out across other book-selling platforms. With help from the donations of concerned readers and authors, various Tennessee bookstores offered to send copies of the book to any student that requested one.

But this ban is hardly an isolated incident. According to a recent American Library Association (ALA) report, an unprecedented 330 books were challenged in the U.S. in the fall of 2021, a significant increase from the 273 challenged titles across 2020.

Books are usually challenged on moral grounds, and parents are often major proponents of these efforts. The activist group No Left Turn in Education, one of the organizations promoting the censorship of certain materials, states on their website, “Our fight is not over until malleable young minds are free from indoctrination that suppresses independent thought.” The group claims that much of the censorship of educational materials combats a “Leftist agenda sweeping into public education.”

Many parents who support the effort to remove certain books argue the material is “obscene” and potentially harmful to their children. They emphasize that, as parents, they have a right to be involved in their children’s education, along with teachers and librarians, to complement their children’s moral and educational interests. According to No Left Turn in Education, this vision is based on “American founding principles” and “family values.”

Other advocates cite not wanting to “get into” certain issues as their rationale for book banning. That’s how Tennessee state Rep. Bruce Griffey defended his rationale for wanting to ban books about LGBTQ+ issues in public schools. Griffey is currently sponsoring a Tennessee House bill that states that such books “promote, normalize, support, or address controversial social issues, such as lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgender (LGBT) lifestyles,” and that LGBTQ+ literature “offends a significant portion of students, parents, and Tennessee residents with Christian values.”

Despite this rhetoric of “protection,” banning books actually leads to the erasure or censorship of certain (usually already marginalized) perspectives. Many of the books that have been challenged have been removed due to their exploration of race, sexuality, gender identity, and religion.

According to the Jewish Book Council, citing the historian Guenter Lewy, in Hitler’s Germany, 5,485 book titles were banned by the Third Reich by the end of World War II. The banned books includ­ed those of “alleged moral cor­rup­tion, works of Marx­ism and paci­fism, books and arti­cles per­ceived as dam­ag­ing the mar­tial spir­it and morale of the Ger­man peo­ple and those prop­a­gat­ing Catholic or oth­er con­fes­sion­al ideas, and works that fell into the catch des­ig­na­tion of ​‘fail­ure to live up to what was to be expect­ed in the new Ger­many.’”

Book bans don’t help students; they only serve parents who want younger people, including but not limited to their own children, to be sheltered from ideas they disagree with. By banning books, especially those that address racism, LGBTQ+ issues, and other important subjects, students’ access to information about the world is limited, which prevents them from exploring new ideas and harms their intellectual growth. Students won’t automatically drop their beliefs just because they are exposed to a different point of view. Rather, that different perspective might help them reconsider their assumptions and, hopefully, broaden their understanding of the world.

Thankfully, many advocates have been combating the rising banning of books in the U.S. — like those who organized a national Banned Books Week in late September of 2021, which celebrated freedom and diversity of ideas and expression. What’s more, with the convenience of technology and the support of educational advocacy groups, curious students can learn about topics that may have been at the center of banned books outside of school. However, having material acknowledging racial, religious, or LGBTQ+ issues in school is incredibly important to normalize, destigmatize, and promote discourse on these subjects.