Book Curation Is Not Censorship

T he American Library Association (ALA) recently lamented a record number of “book bans” in 2022, framing this development as a growing trend of censorship across the country. Of the 1,269 demands made, 58 percent were directed at school libraries. The report goes on to characterize the many parental-rights organizations behind these demands as mere “censorship groups,” infringing upon our rights to read what we want. Countless news organizations picked up the story and ran with the ALA’s framing.

Of course, lurking behind all of this hyperventilation over supposed book banning, there’s a simple truth that needs to be said: None of these books have been banned, none of them have been censored. It smacks of the ironic hilarity of Barnes & Nobles boldly throwing together a “banned book section” for approximately $19.95 a pop — showcasing books so banned that the store receives media praise for broadcasting their sales.

In reality, there’s a drastic difference between government censors black-bagging dissidents for distributing samizdat materials, large corporations like Amazon or Target deplatforming a book, school libraries taking a text off their shelves, and a school replacing one book on their curriculum with another. Lumping all of these together under the term “censorship” — or, at the most panicked, associating them with Nazi book burnings — inhibits our ability to discuss the real, consequential, and ancient debate in question here: What should our kids read?

As early as Plato’s Republic, we see Socrates and his interlocutors quibbling over what stories ought to be central in the education of children. The heroes a society chooses to valorize will encourage in children either bravery or rashness, contemplation or cynicism, activity or sloth. A school that teaches Shakespeare and Homer will foster a very different education than one that places Diary of a Wimpy Kid or smut on its curriculum. In both cases, children will learn lessons and develop values, but they may not be the lessons and values we want to instill.

Socrates knew that literature forms the mind, shapes the soul, and crafts our worldview. One student of mine after finishing Romeo and Juliet confessed that he finally saw the need to curtail his own anger.

Beyond the individual level, it forms a nation, too. When nearly every citizen has read our founding documents and looks to Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches with near reverence, it creates a collective civic agreement on certain values and a healthy love of our own nation’s literature. The consequential decisions over curricular reading lists are no flippant matter, and calling any exclusion of a book “censorship” or a “ban” stunts a necessary debate.

Analyzing perhaps the most controversial “book ban” from last year may prove illustrative. A district in Tennessee “banned” the Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, Maus — or so the media said. However, if anyone cared to read the actual transcript of the school-board meeting in which this decision was made, they’d see that the school didn’t “ban” this book on the premise that it dealt with uncomfortable history. Rather, school officials merely took it off the curriculum because some deemed it too vulgar for eighth-graders and were planning to replace it with another book from the same era at a later meeting.

Were I a member of that board, perhaps I would have voted to keep the book on the curriculum, simply because there was no clear alternative put forth. However, were school officials to recommend Anne Frank’s diary or Elie Wiesel’s Night in its stead, the conversation would quickly change. Like vegetables on a plate, there’s only so much space for books on a curriculum. Eat broccoli or carrots, replace one book with another of equal value, and nothing is lost.

There are countless reasons to choose one or another book for instruction: aesthetic value, difficulty, breadth of topics, genre variety, age-appropriateness, and historical significance. Even in the case of Maus, it would be entirely reasonable for a school to remove it from a reading list if students had already read another Holocaust book in a prior grade but hadn’t yet read a slave narrative.

In my own teaching, I have to make curricular decisions all the time. The inclusion of one book necessitates the exclusion of another. I’ve taught every grade from fifth through twelfth. I never taught Romeo and Juliet to fifth-graders because of its difficulty, violence, and sexual themes, but I taught it in high school. There’s a near-infinite number of books that I never taught, but at no point does this mean I banned any of them.

Ultimately, there’s no expert consensus on what book is perfectly suited for which age. Rather, we must make decisions. Some want to call this censorship. We used to call it prudence and curation, and someone must make these decisions. Our public schools are just that: public institutions. Neither teachers nor parents, administrations, or publishers ought to have the final say on what books should appear in libraries and in classrooms. Our only recourse is debate, discussion, and compromise. Casting off one side as censors or even fascists is not only counter-productive, but ignorant and cruel.