As a college student, I vividly remember some of the books I read growing up. These books shaped me into the person I am today, and helped expand my knowledge beyond what basic information I was learning in my small southern school. Unnecessary banning of books in schools is censorship, and it stops students from learning and forming their own opinions about important issues.
When politics are brought into schools, laws are passed, blocking students from reading certain novels. Of the ten most banned books in 2022, four out of eleven were books containing LGBT+ material. Texas and Florida lead the charts with the most banned books, according to the Pen America website, article titled “Index of School Book Bans Fall 2022.” If congress and other political offices are okay with taking away children’s access to educational books, what will stop them from going further?
Some politicians and parents are worried about books containing information about gender, racism, sexuality and even history. The parents who support book banning usually back it up by saying they do not want their kid to learn about these topics in school, and would rather teach them at home. While this can definitely be understandable when regarding certain topics, I believe that educational topics need to be taught in schools. If we leave it up to parents to teach their children things like racism, how can we make sure a true baseline is being met?
How can we be sure that the parents themselves actually know about the history of slavery, and will relay that information correctly to their child? And what happens to the kids of adults who do not believe that slavery happened, and that repercussions from it are still occurring today? Are we raising more kids to be racist? Of course, this brings up the topic of parents homeschooling their kids, which has become more and more popular, especially with the amount of shootings and crimes occurring in schools across the United States now.
My idea is that parents should have to prove that they are educated up to at least a high school level, so that they can be able to make sure their child will not be substantially behind kids who are attending public or private schools. Of course, this idea only worries about racism – there are a million more topics that people are trying to stop kids from learning about.
This year alone, the state of Florida has banned Advanced Placement African American Studies courses, psychology courses (due to mentions of gender and sexuality) and any mention of sexual orientation or gender identity in every grade. If you combine this on top of Florida being one of the states with the most banned books, you get children being taught a very narrow view of the world.
In my opinion, this will lead to future adults who are not informed about the world outside of what they were taught in school. This will make them hateful, unwilling to grow and be unwelcoming of other communities. When we stop teaching students about the history that shaped the country, we are failing them. We cannot allow people to ignore the past, we should use it to grow.
Book banning, in my opinion, will almost never be helpful. It is a form of censorship that stops students from expanding their knowledge. Parents are scared of their children learning something that they don’t agree with, but just because you may not agree with something, it does not mean you can just act like it doesn’t exist, and block people from learning about it.
