You can't read that

 You can’t read that

 

In a Virginia school district, parents will receive an email telling them every time their child checks out a book.  In a Florida school district, educators have been ordered to remove any books that mention racism, sexism, gender identity or oppression of any kind.   In Pennsylvania, a lay citizen panel will need to sign off on the list of books or other materials that school librarians may order.   In the past two years, six states have moved to limit what kids will be allowed to read and to remove those decisions from professional librarians or educators.  Five more states are considering such legislation this year.

Why are people so afraid and what do we have to lose besides our right to read and think?

Librarians go to school and are educated in the appropriate selection of books for different aged students.  If we do not trust them to do their jobs what will be the consequence.

Are we naïve enough to think that by forbidding kids to read about sex or gender identity they will stop thinking about these topics?  The reality is that when we forbid students from reading material that has been professionally vetted, they will simply move to other sources of information that have not been vetted and may be truly inappropriate. And those unvetted sources will have even more appeal since we all know that what is forbidden becomes immediately desired.  It wasn’t all that long ago when kids learned about sex through prurient novels.  Now they will go to prurient websites.  Is that really what we want?

Some families will tell you that they would certainly not consider book burning- after all authoritarian governments do that.  But books do not need to be burned to be destroyed.  If we go back to the era when all of the children in books had blond hair and peach skin, where does that leave the well over half of our population of kids that do not have these characteristics?  The same is true of LBGTQ kids.  They exist in our schools.  What are we saying to them if they do not exist in our reading material.   You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture, just don’t let people read about it.  Then those people and that culture ceases to be seen and to feel real.  Is this what we want for our children?  Do we really want to create more children who feel alienated from society?

Thinking and reading go hand in hand.  We need to think before we read and to think even harder after we read.

We may take the freedom to read for granted but then again, we took breathing for granted until the doc came with the ventilator.