I am an international correspondent and an education journalist. I cover K-12 schools and higher education from America for Taiwanese readers. Recently, there has been something happening in America that amazes my readers in Taiwan--the book ban controversy. I got a lot of questions and letters from my readers, including parents and educators in Taiwan. Everyone seems to have a hard time believing that United States of America--the country known for its freedom and democracy-- is now banning books.
Unfortunately, it's really happening. As a mom and an education reporter, here's what I want to say: If we try to control our children's thoughts by monitoring what they read, we are going to fail.
Last year, a total of 1597 children's books were banned in the United States, a record high in 20 years. This year, the wave of the book bans continues: in February, the McMinn County School District in Tennessee decided to remove the YA graphic novel MAUS that depicts the Holocaust from eighth grade reading list. In March, an elementary school in Ohio invited children's book writer Jason Tharp to the school to read his work It's Okay to Be a Unicorn, but the event was canceled by the school district because the illustrations of the rainbows and the unicorns in the book were considered "too gay" for some conservative parents. In April, the Florida state government announced that it would completely the classic picture book Everywhere Babies, because there was an illustration of two fathers holding a baby in the book.
Think about it. Book ban, especially children's books book ban, is actually a very wrong thing. Because the reasons behind the book ban are often based on adult's ideological and political debates, rather than children's well-being or physical and mental development. Take the banning of MAUS as an example. Parents think that's okay for teenagers to have books that's pornographic or violent in their backpacks, but want want to ban a book that speaks out for the Holocaust victims because it promotes "critical race theory." This judgement doesn't really make sense, does it? As for the banning of It's Okay to Be a Unicorn and Everywhere Babies, there was no real reason but pure homophobia. In fact, the American Library Association listed the top 10 most challenged books between 2021 to 2020, and all 10 books were banned for political reasons over gender or racial diversity, not pornography or violence issues that parents really need to concern.
Speaking of pornography, Texas Governor Greg Abbott sent a letter to Texas Education Agency at the end of last year, demanding that the librarians who distributed "pornographic books" be brought to justice. A senior high school librarian in Texas said in an interview with NBC that he decided to retire early because of this threat, because the state government's standard of determining pornography is not whether there are excessive sexual descriptions, but whether there is a same-sex love plot. No school librarians could take such a trumped-up charge. The incident shows us that the subsequent chilling effect caused by the wave of book bans is distressing.
Book ban is not new. Forty years ago, Time Magazine reported on the book banning movement at that time, and it showed the similar trend as the current book ban: books involving ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities were especially targeted. Parents who advocate banning children's books rarely realize that banning books runs counter to the American values--freedom and democracy--that we believe in. Why there are so many books being banned in recent years? Why so many parents started to actively advocate for banning children's books? The answer is, they might have always wanted to monitor their children's books. Now with the moralistic sentiment encouraged by the right-wing activists, they feel that they can finally speak out and put this idea into action. In other words, they crave power and want to have control over their children's thoughts.
It's understandable that parents want to be able to control at least some things in their children's lives. But if we want to control children's thoughts by filter the messages our children might receive through books, we are bound to fail. Last December, the North Kansas City Library in Missouri removed the memoirs of two LGBTQ+ writers under the pressure from conservative parent groups. But the library later put the books back on the selves after mass protest from local high school students.
This is what the whole book ban should tell us: good parenting is not to instill our own ideology into our children by monitoring what they read, but to create a trusting relationship with our children, to let them know that they can discuss anything with us, and we are willing to respect their ideas and discuss with them, even when we are confused or angered.
**This article was originally published on Taiwan's Commonwealth Parenting Magazine on May 19, 2022. This is an English translation.
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