Books are being banned from school libraries. Here's what that does to students.
Growing up in the Baltimore area, Zach Koung didn’t have many opportunities to learn about the gay-rights movement, or to read books featuring queer characters and love stories. Such topics and learning materials weren’t a part of his schools’ curricula. Koung became depressed as a teen – and, in retrospect, he’s sure that lack of exposure had something to do with it.
“It was so emotionally draining to know who I was inside yet not see that reflected in the books we read,” said Koung, 18, now a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania. Education is supposed to be about “teaching the facts, teaching science, teaching what’s right, and it made me think something was wrong with me.”
“There was a lot of unlearning that I had to do as a result of that,” said Koung, who serves as a youth leader with the It Gets Better Project, an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization. Part of that unlearning involved a successful run for his local school board. In that role, he pushed for his district’s adoption of an LGTBQ+ studies course, whose development he’s now helping to steer.
Koung is hopeful: That initiative is part of a national trend, driven partly by youth activists, to make curriculum more inclusive. But he’s also deeply concerned about threats to that progress – including a simultaneous trend that’s picked up steam in recent months.
The American Library Association has documented a "dramatic uptick" in challenges to books in libraries' collections. In some states, titles are being pulled from libraries at an unprecedented rate. The association received 330 reports of such challenges last fall alone. Almost all of the most frequently targeted books deal with race, gender or sexuality, and recent challenges have tended to focus on newer titles that explore the intersection between all three – George M. Johnson’s "All Boys Aren’t Blue," for example, and Maia Kobabe’s "Gender Queer."
The largely conservative politicians and parents who have pushed to remove certain titles from schools or libraries say the books are inappropriate for students. The books often contain sexually explicit scenes and vulgar language and explore uncomfortable themes such as death and rape. Some book challengers worry the literature in question fosters biases or guilt. Exposure to that content, they conclude, does more harm than good.
But many students – who according to a recent ALA analysis initiate fewer than 1% of book challenges – believe the reverse is true. Banning books can have academic, social and mental-health consequences, they say, and research seems to support their claims.
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So, what happens to children when they lose access to a certain book, or even when access is simply in question? How does such a challenge affect their academic experience, their relationship with school or their self-image?
Direct links between book banning and young people's well-being are hard to research. One study, published in 2014, found students who read any of the titles on a list of 30 commonly challenged books tended to have better civics participation than those who didn’t. Specifically, banned-book readers were more likely to show interest in elections and be involved in charitable causes.
The study didn’t find any significant correlation between banned-book reading and aggressive behavior or bad grades. And while it did find a small cluster of girls who read books on the list were more likely to struggle with mental health challenges, those were extreme cases, according to Chris Ferguson, a psychology professor at Florida’s Stetson University who authored the study. That may have been because students already struggling with mental illness were drawn to the “edgy” content.
Reading banned books, Ferguson said, “wasn't really a big thing to worry about.”
He emphasized book challenges come from both sides of the aisle. Activists on the left in recent months have challenged Dr. Seuss books, for example, and "To Kill a Mockingbird." “If your kid is isolated and reading a bunch of these books, maybe you want to talk to them, but banning the books isn't going to be the thing that's going to fix this.”
In Ferguson’s view, energy should be spent on improving children’s access to books they want to read. One unanticipated finding from his study: Reading a book for pleasure – rather than reading it as part of a class assignment – was associated with higher GPA.
Maya Mackey, an 18-year-old college freshman in Texas, said reading Toni Morrison’s "Beloved" last semester was transformative.
“You can learn about the plantation system, the horrors of slavery, the generational trauma, but you're not going to get the full impact until you actually see it on an individual level, which ('Beloved') deals with very well,” Mackey said. In the book, a family of formerly enslaved people is haunted by a baby who was killed by her mother so she wouldn’t be subjected to slavery.
Now, Mackey leads the Texas chapter of Voters of Tomorrow, a youth-led organization that engages members of Gen Z in politics. She plans to hand out copies of "Beloved" and "Maus," a graphic novel about the Holocaust, at schools as part of a Voters of Tomorrow initiative in Texas and Virginia.
Trends in both states have epitomized the latest wave of book challenges.
In the fall, citing parents who “are rightfully outraged about highly inappropriate books,” Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott issued a directive asking various agencies to review school library book collections. A state representative also compiled a list of 850 titles, flagging them for potential removal from school libraries.
“A growing number of parents of Texas students are becoming increasingly alarmed about some of the books and other content found in public school libraries that are extremely inappropriate in the public education system,” Abbott wrote in his letter.
Through records requests to nearly 100 school districts in metropolitan areas across Texas, a recent NBC investigation found hundreds of titles have been pulled for review. The outlet identified a huge uptick in the number of formal challenges filed by parents and community members – 75 in the first four months of the semester, compared with just one during the same period a year before. A handful of the districts reported more challenges this year than in the past two decades combined.
And in Virginia, Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who took office last month, ran in part on the promise that he would give parents more of a say in their children’s education. One of his campaign ads last fall featured a mom who didn’t want her son to read "Beloved."
“By banning Pulitzer Prize-winning books such as 'Maus' and 'Beloved,' school districts and states are depriving young people an equal and well-rounded education to their peers in states without these so-called ‘divisive issues’ bills,” said Sari Beth Rosenberg, a New York public school U.S. history teacher and Voters of Tomorrow senior advisor, in a statement. “They undermine young people’s ability to engage in meaningful and complex discussions about history and literature. Students deserve so much better.”
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'Barriers around what you can learn'
Other research on school climates calls into question banning books.
Studies show, for example, that hostile school climates are associated with higher rates of absenteeism and a greater likelihood of dropping out among LGBTQ+ youth. And efforts to remove books featuring LGBTQ+ characters from the campus library can easily make that school feel unwelcoming for a young queer person.
“Seeing a small army of people in your community railing against something that you're already struggling with – that’s the kind of activity that contributes to higher rates of loneliness, isolation and poor mental health," said Brian Wenke, executive director of It Gets Better. Those outcomes can even lead to homelessness.
Schools with LGBTQ+-inclusive curricula had lower rates of bullying, another study found. Other data show queer students at such schools have lower rates of suicide.
That’s in part because “books and stories, in general, have this ability to broaden your horizons – to help you understand experiences that aren’t yours,” Wenke said. The empathy they can foster helps create a school environment where queer youth feel they belong. (It Gets Better will be distributing $500,000 total in grants to LGBTQ+ youth leaders across the country to develop programs that make school more inclusive, including by ensuring access to books.)
“We can't ignore that the reason that a lot of these books started being included in school collections was to help fill a gap,” said the National Coalition Against Censorship's Nora Pelizzari. Many of the titles being challenged, she stressed, feature stories about youth who feel marginalized from their communities.
And while the impacts of book challenges are hard to quantify, various students told Paste BN the dots are easy to connect. Book banning “puts barriers around what you can learn” and perpetuates subjective notions of what’s “controversial,” Koung said.
“You're not going to have a generation that is educated on these legacies of racism and sexism and fascism that these books deal with because that information simply wasn't provided to them,” said Mackey, the Texas freshman.
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And if nothing else, students say the challenges are counterproductive. Banning a book only makes it more tempting, after all. Sales for books such as "Maus" and "Beloved" have soared.
“Kids are going to find the chance to read" controversial books, said Kharia Pitts, 12, a middle schooler in Round Rock, Texas. “It doesn’t matter if they’re banned.”
Last September, Kharia and her friend Jaiden Johnson, also 12, started a virtual book club meant to serve as a safe space where Black children can read literature by and about Black people. Every month, Kharia and Jaiden assign members a new book – many of which are frequently banned – and come up with discussion questions that explore how the title's themes relate to their own lives.
“It’s important to see ourselves in places where people that look like us are the heroes and not just the background characters,” Jaiden said.
Contact Alia Wong at (202) 507-2256 or awong@usatoday.com. Follow her on Twitter at @aliaemily.