Book “bans” in schools
The left loves to distort language in order to mislead the public. You might say it’s one of their favorite tactics, and it’s very effective.
One good example is the morphing of the term “illegal aliens” to “illegal immigrants” to “undocumented workers” and then to “migrants. And have you heard of the word “unhoused” to refer to homeless street people?
Another example has to do with “book bans.” The phrase conjures up Nazi book burnings and dystopic films like Fahrenheit 451, and it’s meant to do so.
But the current “bans” aren’t actual bans at all. They are about school libraries as well as what books to teach in classrooms. Students are completely free to read whatever books they wish (or whatever books their parents let them read, if parents still have control).
Removing a book from a school library or failing to put it there in the first place, or deciding it will not be part of the curriculum, amounts to not recommending it, and/or not facilitating exposure to it. This is a very different thing from banning something. But the left would like you to confuse the two. The linked article does mention schools, but the word “ban” nearly overrides it and is not only misleading but is almost certainly intended to cause an emotional reaction and a connection with Nazis and the like.
From the article:
A new report on book bans in U.S. schools finds Stephen King as the author most likely to be censored and the country divided between states actively restricting works and those attempting to limit or eliminate bans.
PEN America’s “Banned in the USA,” released Wednesday, tracks more than 6,800 instances of books being temporarily or permanently pulled for the 2024-2025 school year. The new number is down from more than 10,000 in 2023-24, but still far above the levels of a few years ago, when PEN didn’t even see the need to compile a report.
Perhaps they didn’t feel the need because a little while ago there were fewer “bans” because school libraries didn’t feel the need to stock books for children promoting homosexuality or trans topics, or to have Stephen King books in primary schools.
I don’t recall any controversial books in my school library, which was pretty small anyway. Nor were they in the children’s room of my local municipal library, which didn’t allow children into the adult section (not “adult” as in sex books, just adult as in grownups) until high school. And even then, the adult section was pretty tame as well.
[NOTE: Stephen King got into some recent trouble on “X,” with a lie he told about Charlie Kirk and which King ultimately retracted.]
I was at a local book festival last weekend (The Word Wrangler, in Giddings, Texas) with my latest YA novel – which had been selected along with books by 20 or so other Texas authors – a festival run by the community public library to encourage reading. They had a display of “Banned Books” – and invited all of us to have our picture taken with it.
I said no, and commented very mildly – that if it were really-oh, truly-oh banned, then we wouldn’t be able to purchase copies of them at all. The so-called “banned” books were just ones which various organizations had found unsuitable for some age groups and schools.
The whole festival was being run by the librarians, who did a lot of work in hosting us all, so I didn’t want to belabor that point in the face of my hosts.
Age restrictions on the young and very young are not bans.
But I’m sure PEN has been infiltrated and taken over by the SWJ and Woke set for propaganda goals year ago.
Salmon Rushdie — where are you?
It’s Hispanic Heritage Month at my local Abq library.
I wanted to go over to the checkout counter and ask when Anglo Heritage Month is. However, I thought better of it.
The Democratic Party has a menu of client groups and the client groups (esp professional associations) are of the opinion that they should be able to operate without being audited or instructed by elected officials and that they should receive MOAR funding from the public treasury. Among their clients are those of the educational apparat and the social work apparat.
I become almost irrationally irate about this. I say “almost” because I think it objectively deserves the anger. This sort of abuse of language happens to be a real hot button for me. For a decade or so my office was in the library of the college where I worked, and I had to walk past the “banned” books display when it was That Time of Year.
I call it “Librarians Hate It When You Question Their Judgment Week.” Because that’s all it is.
Stephen King seems to be a real creep. Never read any of his books myself. Never will now: (a) I don’t read much popular fiction anyway (b) see preceding sentence.
Now that he’s retracted his first lie about Charlie Kirk, King is free to come up with another one.
The new number is down from more than 10,000 in 2023-24,
Hmm. What a quandary. Do the qlbtq’s have to give Trump credit for improving the situation?
And, should Trump take credit for improving the situation?
Transgender (e.g. homosexual, bisexual, simulant) topics. Transsocial, too. Books that normalize abortive ideation and wicked solutions to relieve “burdens”. Books that celebrate Diversity (e.g. racism, sexism, etc) or class-disordered ideologies. Rainbows and albinophobia, too. #HateLovesAbortion
Re: Stephen King
Mac, FOAF:
Yep. King is one helluva writer, but truly a stuck-on-stupid Democrat.
FWIW he grew up poor with a single-mother during the 60s. He bought the 60s package. The bad guys and gals in his books are usually conservative or Christian.
Imprints in youth are hard to grow out of later.
When one of the Little Fireflies was in High School, Mrs. Firefly and I received a letter at home from someone stating he or she was a parent at the school and alerting us to a book assigned to our child’s class, with a few excerpts from the book. The parent had sent the letter to all parents of children in that grade and the letter requested that we contact the school and ask that the book be removed from the curriculum.
Mrs. Firefly was a bit flummoxed. The excerpts did seem disconcerting. She asked me, “What should we do?” I said, “Well, I’m going to read the book.” And I did.
I rather enjoyed it. The author was an English professor and I found his description of the parents of some of the jocks at the fictional High School in the novel a bit two-dimensional, but otherwise I felt it was a good novel, and not only appropriate for our son, but something he would benefit from reading and discussing with his peers and instructor. And, if enough parents objected to the book and the school pulled it I would have been fine with that also. And, if that were the case I probably would have asked my son if he wanted to read it and discuss it with me.
It’s not that so many have strong opinions, it’s that they insist others must share their opinions.
huxley @7:33pm,
I disagree that imprints are hard to grow out of. There were some imprints from my family and youth that took me too long to reason out of, but it wasn’t difficult once I chose to look at the facts and accept the truth.
Many don’t grow out of youthful imprints, but that’s on us. Especially in the modern West. The truth was always around me. It’s my own fault I often ignored it, or, more commonly, avoided it.
In the immortal (literally) words of Jacob Marley, “I wear the chain I forged in life. I made it link by link and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it.”
Walter Kirn had a great tweet a couple of days ago. He was invited to speak somewhere for Banned Books Week, but when the organizers found out that he was “controversial,” he was disinvited. Banned from Banned Books Week!
I cannot recall a school library, when I was young, that kept Stephen King on the shelves. Certainly not any I attended. I was a voracious reader and I’d average one school library book read per day. And I read Stephen King in those days as did many kids my age.
The ones we had controversy about when I was growing up was V. C. Andrews, the “Flowers in the Attic” books, and our library did not make them available without parental permission. But Stephen King was beyond the pale, so no controversy. No one ever thought to put his books in there.
Huxley said, “… I wanted to go over to the checkout counter and ask when Anglo Heritage Month is. However, I thought better of it.”
I tried that once and was told in no uncertain terms that EVERY month is Anglo Heritage Month (you racist).
King was only just becoming known when I was in school and I doubt the library carried him. They did have an old copy of Mein Kampf, but I don’t recall any efforts to ban it. They had no “controversial” section being gate-kept by the librarian.
The most controversial book in my elementary school library was called It Looks Alive To Me, kind of a book version of Night At the Museum. In it, a teenage boy and girl might possibly have sex in a sarcophagus – the writing is so oblique you can’t really tell. It said something about “her sliding her jeans-clad legs close to mine.”
Quite a lot less clear than Genderqueer.
Oh, and what was the Judy Blume teen (not pre-teen) novel? In which the teenage boy names his member, and the teenage girl talks about her period?
In discussing this issue with those who claim a book is “banned”, I’ve never run into one who thinks they’re “banned” in the literal sense. They know better and they are lying but occasionally will say, “what’s the difference if the book isn’t available in the” library,, required reading, etc. IOW, what’s wrong with lying.
NancyB,
That is hilarious!
The approved terms are “differently documented newcomers” and “differently housed residents.” I wish you’d avoid the old, discredited hate speech.
The town library in my old home town shared space with the school library in the first floor corner of the elementary school, but they were.physically separated. My school library card would not allow me to take books from the city side, and the city did not issue library cards to kids under 16. The school library had nothing that was not “age apropriate” (11 and under). I can’t remember how I got to it, but I found a copy of _The Yearling_ on the city side when I was in 4th grade. I think that the librarian was distracted and the cover attracted me. I read the first few pages and decided I’d like to read it. I took it up to the desk and I found out about the difference in the cards. It required permission from my teacher and my parents to get it out.
Of course that was .. . yee gads… 3/4 of a century ago.
When I was quite young and attending Girl Scout camp, I tried to check out a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim” from the little library maintained by camp counselors. They hemmed and hawed and decided it wasn’t suitable for someone my age, and anyway they thought it was a bad idea for me to be spending my time at camp reading. Why they had a library, I have no idea.
I never did get around to reading it.
Over the course of our kids’ schooling, we’ve questioned a few of the choices in the English classes. Mostly re age-appropriateness. Would gladly repeat those efforts as needed.
Liberals “curate”, Conservatives “ban”.
“Liberals” lie.
All the time.
About everything.
Prove me wrong.
A ” ban” usually meant extra effort to find that book.
Only the “cool” kids had read that book.
“Librarians Hate It When You Question Their Judgment Week.”
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It’s a residual occupation, nowadays. Hospitals, law firms, and some corporations have maintained libraries to provide research material for their professionals. These aside, libraries have been public agencies, ensconced in other public agencies (schools), or ensconced in schools in the philanthropic sector. Occasionally, you’ll see them organized as stand-alone philanthropies (‘free libraries’).
==
They have an hourly staff largely composed of women who are adding to the family income with a low-pressure job (with a few young men starting out in life). They have a salaried staff. Bar perhaps the office manager or a resident IT tech, these will be graduates of library schools. It’s about a 50-50 split between those who picked the trade as their preferred adult career on the one hand and those who failed at something else previously; some of the latter are burned-out schoolteachers. The division of tasks between the hourly staff and the salaried employees is typically artificial and in larger libraries where the staff is allocated in different departments, you have librarians who would require a training program to do the work in a different department.
==
Library schools are credential factories which have as time has gone on been less-and-less devoted to imparting practical skills. The professional literature is chock-a-block with cack-handed studies of a sort you might find in the journals of teacher-training faculty (Speaking of ‘school-of-education’ research E.D. Hirsch has referred to these sorts of studies as ‘cargo-cult science’). Most librarians do not pay much attention to ‘library lit’. The American Library Association and its magazine are peddlers of silly guild narratives. The American Library Association maintains ’round tables’ some of which are devoted to improving the execution of practical tasks and some of which are clubs full of ideologues. The people active in the American Library Association are commonly fools and red-haze sectaries.
==
buddhaha,
At my public school we read “The Yearling” as a class. I don’t recall what grade I was in. I’m pretty sure that was the first time I encountered the word, “chifforobe.”
@Rufus T. Firefly:I’m pretty sure that was the first time I encountered the word, “chifforobe.”
My generation all had to read To Kill a Mockingbird and encountered the word there.
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
“There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language.”
George Orwell , yet again, describes it best.
Manipulating language, ye’ say?
Distorting it?
Subverting it?
Perverting it?
Faking it?
Well, OK, but the experts tell us it’s for the greater good…
Well, mostly… (but whose?)
Um, sometimes?
Er, hardly ever?
(So who ye’ gonna call…? Symantyx-Busters?)
“Erasing Encephalitis — Why Vaccine Brain Injuries Became Autism”—
https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2025/10/03/why-vaccine-brain-injuries-became-autism.aspx
I’m remembering a lapsed employee of Norman Lear’s People for the American Way writing in Harper’s many years ago what the ‘Most Challenged Book’ citation meant when you looked under the hood. He reported that a year’s ‘Most Challenged Book’ typically had accumulated fewer than ten complaints and a typical ‘challenge’ was one parent’s gripe, about which nothing was done.
Stephen King. The author that sort of invented the school shooter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rage_(King_novel)
School shooter Michael Carneal actually had a copy of King’s novel.
I’m sure there was a school shooting somewhere that predates 1977, though I haven’t looked.
I was sufficiently impressed with the old movie Christine (1983), that I decided to read the King novel on which it was based. I thought it was rather good. John Carpenter directed the film, and then young heartthrob actor John Stockwell later became a decent director in his own right.
@JohnTyler:“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” George Orwell , yet again, describes it best.
Orwell was describing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which, like Freudianism, had wide currency among the intellectuals of its day but like Freudianism, has since been discredited.
For example, roughly half of human languages lack words that correspond to English “yes” and “no”, like Latin and the Chinese languages, but the people who speak those languages still can think of and express what we mean by them, they just need more words to do it in.
What the Left does with language is more-or-less rhetorical tactics, the most common I see being motte-and-bailey, question-begging, and equivocation. A child can be trained to see through them. An adult sometimes has difficulty finding the motivation, though.
@TommyJay:I’m sure there was a school shooting somewhere that predates 1977, though I haven’t looked.
The first one I know of that looks “modern”, a student coming to school and shooting at other students, was in Camden, New Jersey in 1914 but nobody died. The first one I know of where someone died as a result was in 1967.
Now there have been a lot of instances of people in schools being shot going back to the 19th century, but those were usually spontaneous fights between habitually-armed students, or an adult shooting at students, or a a student specifically targeting one person, usually a teacher. And a lot of accidental discharges of course.
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My wife was a school librarian for many years. When a parent would question or challenge a book they would discuss it and about 70% of the time she would move it from the elementary to the middle school libraries and the other 30% of the time she would retain it at elementary but make sure not to put it in special displays. 27 years, no further problems.
Librarians usually don’t want to fight, but library schools and magazines do.