Censoring Detracts From Learning

Libraries are under attack these days, and so you might say learning is under attack too.

Part of what I try to do in this column is to emphasize the importance of building learners who can define, plan, execute, and evaluate their own learning. Libraries, along with other centers of academic and social capital, assist in that process.

So, an attack on libraries must be seen as an attack on learning.

I like to listen to “The Ezra Klein Show,” a podcast produced by The New York Times. Recently, Emily Drabinski, the president of the American Library Association, was interviewed by guest host Tressie McMillan, a Times opinion columnist. Here are some snippets of that interview:

“TMC: The library is as much an idea as it is a place. It promises books, yes, but also services, access and public infrastructure in an information-based economy.”

“For a long time, the idea that we all generally want more of what the library offers has been a taken-for-granted American value. But recently, libraries have become a political lightning rod, where even the most basic assumption of the value of this essential public good is now somehow controversial.”

“According to the American Library Association, last year there were 1,269 attempts to censor what materials appeared in public libraries. Across the nation, there are contentious debates raging over things like drag story hours, children’s programming and even what books and programming should be available for adults in public and school libraries.”

“Emily Drabinski is paying very close attention to these efforts to censor libraries. She should be. Drabinski is what you might call a librarian with a capital L. In 2022, she was elected president of the American Library Association, a professional organization representing the nation’s librarians. She also happens to be a queer person, a parent, a longtime librarian and also, in her academic work, a scholar of critical librarianship.”

“I wanted to talk to Emily about the political and cultural anxieties fueling anti-library sentiments across the United States and what it all says about the health of our body politic.”

…

“You’ve written that children are people who deserve private reading lives…So I wondered if you could tell me what you mean when you say children are people who deserve private reading lives.”

“ED: That’s a big question, and I don’t know how popular it is to think of kids in that way. Since I became President of the American Library Association, I have spent so much time reading through our documents, our policies, our position papers, our analyses.”

“And one of the things that makes me quite proud is the commitment that we have to children as people who can read. I have a child of my own. When everyone’s like, parents should only be able to control what their children read, I’m like, do you have a child? Have you met a child?”

“The degree of control you have over a child is more limited than I sometimes want. But I think it comes down to respect for individual people and their right to their own imagination and the sovereignty of their own minds.”

“And attacks on libraries right now are shaped and framed as attacks on books. But I think we all know they’re attacks on people and attacks on children. We hear less from the readers and the writers of these books than I think we need to.”

“TMC: So what is critical librarianship? Tell us what that is.”

“ED: Like anything, there are a million definitions, and who you ask will tell you something different. I think of critical librarianship as taking a critical view of the systems and structures that produce the library as we know it and experience it and think about ways that library could be different.”

“So I’ve done most of that work around cataloging and classification, and thinking about the language that we use to describe things, and thinking about the order in which we put things. And so you go into a library, and you think the books are just arranged in Dewey decimal order. And that’s kind of annoying, but whatever.”

“But critical librarianship takes an interest in what that knowledge organization system, the story it tells about itself through the ordering mechanism.”

“TMC: Let’s talk about book challenges. The American Library Association has an office that tracks reported of book challenges. In 2022, that office received a record 1,269 challenges, which is the most on record. That’s nearly double the 729 challenges reported in 2021. What patterns are we seeing in these challenges?

“ED: They’re all the patterns that you would guess that you probably don’t need me to say, but I think it’s important to say it again and again. These books are books that tell stories about certain kinds of lives and experiences – the lives and experiences of Black people, the lives and experiences of LGBTQ+ people, the lives and experiences of people of color. They’re attacks are on those kinds of stories, books that are about you and about me.”

“TMC: On the A.L.A.’s list of most challenged books in 2022, four of the top five feature queer characters, and that’s a pretty consistent pattern going back several years. And then we start to see a shift over the last few years to stories featuring more trans characters.”

“ED: Yeah, if we define the problem as simply one banned book, the solution is put that book back on the shelf. So I think it’s really important to think about the problem more expansively, as you’re describing it.”

“TMC: And so what would it mean to think beyond that solution of put the book back on the shelf? What is larger – if it is larger than that, how do we need to think? Instead of just going to them and saying, hey, no, not those books, showing up at my local library meaning, hey, not those books? What would it mean for me to argue more broadly?

“ED: I think a couple of things. It’s not just not those books. It’s not those people.”

“That’s the link that I see when you’re describing the sort of anti-trans laws which are about not wanting trans people in the world.”

“There was a recent study that came out looking at the status of queer kids and queer books and queer school libraries. And 90 percent of the respondents said one of the places they feel safe at school is their school library. So there’s that piece.”

“And then I think the other piece is thinking about the ban on the book is also a ban on the library and wanting the library to disappear. So we’re seeing in some of the attacks, if the books aren’t banned or they’re banned in a way we don’t want or not enough or not – whatever. It’s hard to even know.”

“It seems like it doesn’t have a whole lot to do actually with how the library engages or reacts. The next sort of next step is to defund the library altogether and eliminate it. And we see this in Michigan. It happened in Northern Idaho. It’s happened in states that are withdrawing their support from A.L.A. Part of the project is to dismantle these institutions, period.”

“And so for all the reasons that we just talked about how libraries are amazing community anchor institutions, efforts to dismantle them and disappear them, that seems part of the end game as well.”

“TMC: It reminds me so much, what you just described – I just had this short of shiver because it reminds me so much of the massive resistance response to school desegregation, which is, if we have to allow one Black child, we’d rather there be no school at all.

“ED: We’ll fill in the swimming pool with concrete.”

Censorship is a check on learning – plain and simple. And in this day and age, with all of the problems we face in this world, we need learners.

Til tomorrow. SVB