Book restriction has been a contentious topic in schools throughout the last several years. Is there any merit to this practice?
During the week of September 22-28, Banned Books Week was in full swing across Northern High School and the wider country. Northern High School English teachers put up signs about different books which are restricted across the country, and the school’s Amnesty International Club offered for members to create “Wanted Posters” for books which were restricted nationally.
That week commemorating banned books brought the question of book restrictions–and whether they amount to censorship–back into full view across Northern and the country. When speaking about Banned Books Week, Honorary Chair of ALA’s Banned & Challenged Books explained, “I believe that censorship is the enemy of freedom. By banning books, we deny ourselves the opportunity to learn from the past and to envision a braver future. Books have the power to open minds and build bridges. This is why certain forces do not want the masses to engage with books. They fear progress and growth in new, bold directions.”
Book restriction has been rising in scope and frequency across the country over the last several years; according to PEN America, the restriction of books is defined 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 previously accessible 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.”
As the quote described, this practice became common–there were 1477 instances of book bans tracked by PEN America during the 2022-2023 school year alone. This report by the organization explains the concentration of book bans during the year; 44% included themes of violence and physical abuse, 38% covered topics on health and well-being for students, 30% discussed grief and death, 30% included characters of color and/or discussed racial issues, 26% presented LGBTQ+ characters and themes, 24% detailed sexual experiences, and 17% discussed teen pregnancy, abortion, and sexual assault. As seen in the statistics, books commonly contain multiple “offending” themes–as stated in the article, “these categories are often overlapping; several content areas intersect in most books.”
Generally, book restriction occurs as a result of individuals, organizations, or lawmakers driving books to be raised as problematic and then censored in libraries. PEN America notes how “Of the 1,477 reported book ban cases this school year, 74% are connected to organized efforts, mainly of advocacy groups, elected officials, or enacted legislation. Of these, 20% are connected to organized advocacy groups, meaning actions by them influenced a book ban. The most influential of these groups, Moms for Liberty, is connected to 58% of all advocacy-led book bans around the country…Additionally, 25% of individual books banned were connected to political pressure from elected or appointed officials… Lastly, 31% of book ban instances were connected to newly enacted state laws in Florida, Utah, and Missouri.” Advocacy groups commonly play a role in the restriction of books, as they are concerned about certain topics or themes being available for minors to read and consume.
There are varying opinions on whether or not book restriction is a healthy practice. There are arguments for both sides; on one hand, many believe that book restriction helps to protect children from dangerous and provocative topics. Others find it to be glorified censorship that encourages parents and advisory boards to dictate what children can read.
In Maryland specifically, the number of books that have been restricted recently soared. The American Library Association (ALA) noted that “There were attempts to censor more than 100 titles” in the state; Patch elaborated on an ALA report by explaining, “In Maryland, there were 13 attempts to ban or restrict books in 2023, with 148 titles affected.” While there are no recent statistics, a new change to Maryland’s book banning policy occurred in April of this year. The Maryland General Assembly passed the Freedom to Read Act, which was a “law that prohibits school and public libraries from excluding material solely because of the author’s origin, background or views, or for partisan, ideological or religious reasons,” as noted by The Baltimore Sun. While this bill did not fully prohibit book restriction in the state, it did end restriction based on the aforementioned topics; as such, each school library must have a uniform process for requesting the removal of a book. The bill was “based on one Illinois passed last year,” with California also following suit.
While this act will impede certain attempts to restrict books, it does not necessarily mean that book restriction is impossible; as such, different candidates for Calvert County Commissioner have distinct opinions on how they would handle book restriction. When asked at the Board of Education Candidate Forum about book banning and age appropriateness, Mr. Marchio, one of the candidates, explained how “…We need to make it fully transparent as to exactly what books are available in what schools and for what children, and make sure parents are fully aware of what they are and are given the ability to opt their children out of being able to look at those books or check them out. There’s plenty that have sexually explicit material in middle school and other grades that simply don’t need to be there; it doesn’t matter what kind of sexual relationship it is, it shouldn’t be anywhere in our schools. Just like how we wouldn’t allow, you know, an adult entertainment magazine in our schools… my opinion is [that] it shouldn’t be in schools. But, that’s up to the parents, and the parents should be involved–it needs to be transparent, and the parents should have the ability to make sure that their kids can’t check that book out…”
Ms. Flaim countered his view by explaining that “I trust the librarians and the educators to choose age-appropriate books; I trust the librarians because they witness those children from the beginning through the whole school cycle, so they know what books will appeal to different students and different children. I really appreciate the educators and the librarians fostering a love of reading, because kids who love reading have greater test comprehension scores. If you have a love of reading, the world opens up to you–we really need to celebrate all the kids who read. You know, not everybody likes every book, so you need a variety of books for all the different kids… so I feel like there are plenty of kids out there who read a book and are enthralled for the rest of their lives. I think in this time and age of cell phones, TikTok, and Instagram, we should be celebrating all of the educators and all the librarians who foster this love of learning and reading.”
Dr. Shisler echoed her views, noting, “When we start talking about book bans, it’s a very, very slippery slope. We will say and we will hear that it’s a First Amendment right, and [the] First Amendment is not just free speech, it’s free thinking and free reading–and all of that is tied together. I agree with what Ms. Flaim said about the quality of our librarians in our district; three years ago, just in 2021, they won a national award from the American Library Association as a system for the quality of the libraries in our schools. When they review books, the elementary librarians meet quarterly, the middle and high school librarians meet monthly, and they’re quite aware of the books that are in the hot seat… so when we start banning books… maybe my initial point should have been, ‘Talk to your school librarian.’ Tell the librarian your concerns if you know what title you don’t want your child to read, you’ve got that option to say they won’t read it, and the librarian is going to work with you. That’s already there, that’s already embedded in the system, but your right to say no for your child doesn’t mean you have the right to say no for this child or for that child.”
Ms. Goshorn provided an opposing, nuanced view, arguing that “I don’t support banning books, but what I have heard from many members in our community is that they’re concerned about what they’re seeing in the news, so there’s a lot of reports in the news about sexually explicit books… I wanted to give you an example of a book that many parents are concerned about. There’s a book called ‘Damsel,’ it’s currently available in Huntingtown, Calvert, and Northern High School. When we talk about parents understanding what their parents have access to, they do so through a system called Destiny. In Destiny, the description for Damsel says that the book is about ‘Waking up in the arms of Prince Emory, Ama has no memory of him rescuing her from a dragon’s lair, but she soon discovers there is more to the legend of dragons and damsels than anyone knows and she is still in great danger.’ It says that it’s a fantasy book with an interest level of Young Adult; conversely, a site called Common Sense Media that looks at books and movies and TV shows says that this book contains ‘graphic descriptions of a character being digitally raped by her rescuer, and a young woman is stabbed by a sword and digitally raped in that wound’… as you can imagine, Destiny does not tell their child that they are about to read a book about a girl that is raped in a wound. As a Board of Education member, I would vote to make sure that our books are properly cataloged, so our parents know that if their child are picking up a book that talks about rape. I think that is more important than literally anything else; our parents need to know that they are going to read a book like this, and they currently don’t have access [to that information].”
Mr. White finished by saying, “As a sitting Board member, first of all, I trust the librarians and the media specialists. When they come and they speak, like Dr. Shisler says, we have national award-winning librarians and I’ve always advocated for them. We have a system called HAC, where if you communicate with your students with this system, you can actually set alerts to whatever books they’re checking out or what’s going on. So, we already have a system in place to track that and keep control of what’s going on there. I think that students need to see themselves in the books; I don’t think someone else should be able to make decisions for someone else’s kid like Dr. Shisler said… we can sit here and say what we would and what we wouldn’t do, but we are not trained. We don’t have the education or knowledge that some of these people [librarians] have; the books that are in our libraries are vetted. There is no state-wide book banning–I don’t even like using the word book ‘banning,’ because we aren’t banning books in Calvert County. There are some books that have restrictions, there are currently three books that have restrictions on them, so that’s a little different from banning books. When people come to meetings and read the most explicit parts of a book in a live meeting in front of kids, who’s really the “groomer”? Who’s really exposing it? It’s not those people that are trying to protect them [kids], that’s the librarian with the rules we have in place.”
The student body was additionally surveyed as a whole on the topic. In total, 125 students responded to the survey; on a scale from 1 to 5, approximately 42% entered a 1 for how much books should be restricted in school libraries, 34% said a 2, 13% said a 3, and under 1% said a 4 and a 5. With the same question asked in public libraries, around 87% entered in a 1 for restriction. For the themes that students believed should be restricted, students were asked to select multiple or none of the listed themes. 58% of respondents believed that none of the themes should be restricted, followed up by 26% being sexual experiences, 17% being teen pregnancy, abortion, and sexual assault–as well as 14% consisting of LGBTQ+ characters and themes.
Two students and a teacher from Northern were also interviewed on this topic. Mrs. Ekelund, the AP Literature teacher, shared her views on book restriction by saying, “Oh, I’m completely against it… I think that banning books is just fear… fear of the populace against creativity, against literacy, against letting people live their lives the way they choose to live them.” There are two books that are currently restricted in Calvert County for explicit material–Looking for Alaska and All Boys Aren’t Blue–as well as Blankets, which is a graphic novel.
She felt that none of them deserved restriction, as “I’ve read all three of them, and I just feel that you are first giving notice to young people to read those books because you’re trying to ban them, and they’re naturally curious and they want to know why. But also, I do not believe that there is anything in those books that a high school student should be told not to read about. It all comes from a place of fear, fear that your child will read something, and then somehow that will lead them to a point in their lives where their parents don’t want them to be.” Similarly, Mrs. Ekelund clarified that “…it might not be something that they’re specifically assigned in class, but I have no problem with them reading that. Look at what they watch on Netflix… why stop them from finding out about the way the world is?”
When a freshman, Kaya Dickerson, was queried on whether books should be restricted, she felt similarly to Mrs. Ekelund: “I feel like books don’t need to be restricted, it’s just a book–and if you take a book personally, then that’s the person’s problem. Books can help people express many things in many ways, and they give people a sort of escape to another world if you love a book so much. I love books a lot, and I feel like a lot of books should be available to people…”
Dickerson additionally added that “once you get to high school, I feel like it’s okay to start opening up those older-aged books, because you go through those things eventually and have to learn about them,” whereas she does “get it” if one would restrict certain books in elementary or middle school. Mrs. Ekelund also iterated that there would need to be “some extent” and “common sense” should be used when it comes to book availability for lower grades.
Grover provided an opposing view that supported a large majority of book restriction, echoing what Marchio and Goshorn noted in the Candidate Forum. He described how “if we’re going to restrict everything that a student can do at school–including which websites they can visit on their computer and what information they can access electronically–why don’t we limit the books that they read in the school library in the same way? If a student isn’t able to access pornography or explicit material on their computer, then why should they be able to do so through widely available books in the library?” Grover did agree that the public library is “a bit different.”
His primary point was that schools should “just adhere to whatever the FCC standards are for movie and television essentially, but instead in book format.” Grover believed that schools should simply follow similar standards as for movies and shows; he added that he would restrict “anything graphic or explicit in content… anything rated R if it was a film, anything that would be rated MA if it was TV.” In his view, books which did not have “academic value” and were explicit deserved restriction; if they were explicit and had academic value, then it would depend on the specific content present. If the content was excessively explicit, it could always be “skipped or redacted.”
Grover rounded out the discussion by noting how “…of course there’s certain cases where they aren’t justified–there’s obviously circumstances where there could be a misuse of power in banning books, but I support a decent amount of the restrictions on books in school libraries. I feel like that power can be abused, and it needs to be monitored closely; the power should only be used when there is a clear and obvious need for a restriction, such as in matters of extremely graphic content.”
This is truly the question at the heart of book restriction that educators and advocacy groups will have to answer: When is book restriction justified–if ever–and how far are you able to take it? As the rate of book restrictions rises, this is a problem that will need to be carefully considered from all angles before making future decisions.