> PEN America defines a school book ban as any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished.
So I think one thing to keep in mind is that books added or removed from shelves based on the editorial choices of the library staff is not considered a book ban - and it's why books like Mein Kampf or Lolita don't also show up on these lists despite being very intentionally kept off the shelves by librarians.
Oftentimes school districts or libraries already have a system in place where offensive or non age-appropriate books can have restrictions placed on it based on parent or student feedback.
All this to say I think it makes book bans a bit muddier - in some instances they might be legitimate pushback on aggressive editorialization by librarians. But in most instances, they are self-obviously performative and unnecessary.
"it's why books like Mein Kampf or Lolita don't also show up on these lists despite being very intentionally kept off the shelves by librarians."
It seems like they would count those books as being banned if they had a means for gathering the information.
"Since 2021, there have been numerous accounts of quiet removals of books in libraries and classrooms by teachers and librarians. School districts have started issuing preemptive bans through 'do not buy' lists, barring titles from ever entering their libraries. . . . Therefore, PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans is best thought of as a minimum count of book banning trends. This is a similar conclusion to that of the American Library Association, which routinely estimates that its counts reflect only a portion of the true number of books banned in schools."
> All this to say I think it makes book bans a bit muddier - in some instances they might be legitimate pushback on aggressive editorialization by librarians. But in most instances, they are self-obviously performative and unnecessary.
You could easily make those arguments on the book bans themselves.
One common argument I've seen floated in these conversations is that whatever this you call this behavior, it's not that bad because there are lots of other means to access the banned books.
But if that's the case - why bother in the first place? Is it all just performative virtue signaling that has no measurable effect on children's means to access these books? If not, shouldn't we be interrogating their reasoning?
In a controlled and editorialized context in the high school senior and college contexts (age 17+), Mein Kampf, Ted Kaczynski, and Marx should be taught to critically dissect bad ideas and immoral political prescriptions because it's important to teach future generations how to recognize and resist awful ideologies. Not doing so invites vulnerability to history rhyming more than it needs to.
Filtering content for children is not 'banning books'.
By this definition, The Bible is the most "banned book" across the country, even though it's probably the most consequential piece of literature ever written.
This continuous doublespeak is even more humorous considering the site has actual shopping links to every 'banned book'.
Agreed, this is very politically charged. The method for qualifying a "banned book" is not described in detail and seems to only include those with a political lean, when there are obviously other books that aren't shown to kids that didn't make the list.
The system they're using is in their faq, in detail. Basically it is books that were previously available but have been removed due to external pressure.
I have absolutely no problem saying that bigots who insist that no books containing LGBT characters appear in libraries are bad people while also thinking that The Turner Diaries shouldn't be in public schools.
> who insist that no books containing LGBT characters appear in libraries
Is this a common stance? I thought it was more like, no books glorifying LGBT lifestyle or teaching it as if it’s not controversial and it’s just a fact of life (as proponents sincerely believe, of course, not saying no one is thinks it is a fact of life, that’s just the part that is controversial). I understand disagreeing with that, but it isn’t the same as opponents pushing for zero gay/etc characters period, right?
I haven’t been following this topic too closely though so I might be missing what people are screeching about on the right today.
My aunt is a Republican lobbyist. She believes that nobody is actually gay and that it is a mental illness where people are tricked into thinking it is possible to be gay and that this can originate from being exposed to gay people.
She has a bisexual daughter who has attempted suicide twice. She has told her daughter that she’d be better off dead than bi.
Also I’m very sorry if there are books that contain gay characters where there aren’t constant asides reminding the reader that these people are going to hell. The “gay lifestyle” is just gay people existing.
My life before and after discovering the nature of my queerness is remarkably similar, though with a fair few more relationships and a lot less anguish afterwards.
Weasel words like those are usually used by people to distance themselves from outright hatred of the people they dislike. "Oh, I don't hate you for being LGBT, I just hate and disagree with your lifestyle, which is something that you chose." See, totally different!
The implication of "lifestyle" usually being "ability to exist in a society without any major obstacles due to being LGBT", "ability to receive true healthcare related to being LGBT", "ability to be legally recognized and accommodated as a result of it" or "ability to express your queerness in public without being seen as the villain".
A very commonly banned book here in the United States - at least historically - is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. There's a specific chapter that my mind has returned to, again and again, in situations where anonymous cowards issue threats from behind the veil of anonymity:
The older I get, the more I think that there is wisdom in the words of Col. Sherburn on the cowardice of the average person.
By the way, I wonder if HN is aware of whose alt account this is. If they are, I wonder if they would punish the original poster for issuing threats on an anonymous account. I...admit that I don't have high hopes, but I live to be surprised.
In my state (South Carolina) this is exactly how they handled it. If a parent or activist wishes see a book banned it goes through reviewed based on school-level appropriateness. A book like The Kite Runner with its deprecations of Bacha Bazi are a bit rough for a 5th grader but considered acceptable for a High Schooler given the cultural significance of the work.
As cryptically referred to by the villain in the perhaps most famous of American novels. Credit Wikipedia:
> Grant became a part of popular culture in 1920s America. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald made a lightly disguised reference to Grant in The Great Gatsby. In the book, the character Tom Buchanan reads a book called The Rise of the Colored Empires by "this man Goddard", a combination of Grant and his colleague Lothrop Stoddard. ...
> ... "Everybody ought to read it", the character said. "The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."
I don't know, I didn't come in here with particularly strong feelings about what "ban" means or should mean re books but people keep coming at me extremely hot for saying not much about it at all.
Personally I think using banned for "actively prevented from accessing in ways other books are not" makes plenty of sense even if you can effectively circumvent those attempts somehow.
The strict meaning that people seem to want to apply in here does not seem particularly useful to me. Almost no books have ever been banned by that standard, but there is a clearly organized movement in the US to remove all reference to queerness from public life. Flexible on nomenclature here but that context is very important.
It may seem like an attack on queer books, but as far as I can tell none of the straight books seem to be trying to explain how minors should get access to adult dating apps to meet older men, or showing obscene graphical depictions of sodomy involving children.
I think if librarians were buying "straight" books with the same explicit and adult content and putting them in elementary, middle, and high schools, the same parents would be complaining about those too.
I suspect that whatever example they had in mind, it's a passage that is descriptive of someone's personal experience while not being prescriptive in telling the reader step-by-step how to follow in their footsteps.
Without the banning method this is just click bait to sell books. Every book on a ban list is still easily available. It would be weird for something as explicit as a kama sutra book to be found in an elementary school library. It might be appropriate at a high school library. But any kid at any time can go to a public library or book store and find just such a book. The parents get to decide when sexually explicit material is appropriate for their children. Schools do the same by proxy. There is nothing wrong with this setup.
The most targeted book in america is Looking For Alaska. You and I have a very different understanding of what "sexually explicit material" means if you think that this book is erotica.
Remember that the parents are deciding for other parents what appears in libraries.
Apparently I made my point poorly. Kama sutra was an example that I think everybody could agree shouldn't be in a children's library. My point was that everybody gets to decide what is in their children's library. Most of the people in that area probably agree. But, everybody can still go to any bookstore and find the same books. They are not banned in any way. As the OP said, without criteria on why a book is "banned" lists like this are pointless. A library or school district deciding they don't want a book doesn't make it banned. The problem is that people thousands of miles away think that those people far away are too restrictive or liberal in their book selections presented to children.
My second point was that since all these "banned" books are still available for sale; getting on a banned book list is just a tactic to sell more books. This list even has affiliate links to the books. Which make the whole page click bait.
Bigoted parents forcing librarians to remove books that they feel have educational merit because they offend the sensibilities of bigoted parents is bad.
You can call it a different word if you want I guess. But I'm absolutely baffled that people are spending their time worrying about the word "banned" here. This shit is awful.
every parent that is “pro” book banning is a shitty parent, period. I am kind of glad this book banning has spread as it helped me weed out some people from my life. life is to short to spend around shitty parents. I can pretty much live with any flaw (I have 100’s) but being a shitty parent is not one I am willing to be around
Conversations like these are so immensely frustrating to have on Hacker News.
This thread is full of people falling over themselves trying to convince you that a book ban isn't actually a book ban, and whatever it happens to be isn't that big of a deal.
If the banning of books from libraries isn't a big deal - why is it being done in the first place? Is it just virtue signaling, or does it have a specific objective? If it has a specific objective, isn't that objective worth interrogating instead of brushing off as not a big deal because the book is still available through other means?
The objective is a foothold in culture war stuff, largely around LGBT people but about other things too. The ultimate goal is to re-establish a culture where gay people are unable to be out in public, especially in places where there are children. This means no gay teachers. No gay characters in media. Websites with LGBT content being treated as pornographic and requiring age verification.
The narrative is "look at these liberals forcing sex on children." Parents go to school board meetings and read passages ripped from context as lurid eroticism to rile up their neighbors. If normies go along with this "think of the children" stuff then it becomes a foothold to the next steps. We've seen this trans people, where bigots have successfully converted "this is about girl's sports" into policies banning healthcare and safe bathroom use.
At this point it's extremely clear - objectively, by counting criminal convictions - which demographic is a real danger to kids, not just sexually but in many other ways.
And it's very much not the writers of books with LGBT content.
I can understand why the real culprits might want to deflect attention from their moral failings onto others, and why pointing out the facts might make them very, very angry.
Not sure what your point is. 1984 is available at my middle school, high school and public libraries and every book store. Not available at elementary schools because it is generally above grade level.
Filtering content sounds like doublespeak for banning to me. The title is Top 52 Banned Books: The Most Banned Books in U.S. Schools, how is it that inaccurate?
because that would suggest something very bad is happening in the US and the HN party line is "this is nothing unusual, typical woke [1] panic attack over nothing, now please get back to your HN job of trying to win VC money"
At least in my mind it's unfair because the books are not in any way banned. Anyone can get them. They're more available than perhaps any time in history. The school's decision not to stock them may merit criticism, but the books are hardly "banned" in the traditional sense of the word.
99.99% of all books ever are not going to be available at your local library. But we don't consider those to be "banned" either. Here, the difference is that these books were selected and stocked in the past, but were removed due to political pressure - or these books weren't available, but a ruling from up above blanket banned their libraries from being able to consider them in the first place. It's frustrating to see so many people in this comment section equate these two.
Just because you can find those books online or elsewhere doesn't mean that the rulings to ban them from school libraries isn't about trying to restrict access to that information.
The point the OP made was specifically to call out what they deemed as doublespeak of the word ban. I made no comment on why any given book is justifiably banned or "filtered".
> I certainly wouldn’t want my children getting exposed to books that normalise trans ideology, for example.
fortunately "trans ideology" is a nonexistent boogeyman made up by whatever vile youtube videos or FOX news you're watching, so there's no worry about such books existing
The problem is that the definition of "things that are inappropriate for kids" brought up by book-banners is almost always heavily inspired by religion. A book containing graphical violence and sex, like the Bible? Totally okay! A book containing casual day-to-day life, like mentioning in passing that little Johnny next door has two dads? Somehow completely inappropriate.
They never said that. They just pointed out the hypocrisy of the situation, where certain topics normally deemed extremely controversial by those very figures become totally fine if they're brought up along the lines of their ideology. The comment contains no judgements on what should be included or excluded from their point of view.
Separation of church and state, especially when schools don’t allow alternative books (eg in some Bible Belt areas). Also, the bible does have violence, sex (including rape and incest), etc.
I understand there are reasons it could be banned, but I'm saying that in reality it is not. It is widely available in elementary and middle school libraries.
Except for one case in Texas that made a splash in the news last year, I didn't find other cases of the Bible being banned from school libraries. Did I miss something?
If not, it would make sense that Texas made the news because it's out of the ordinary.
Yeah this is a strange way to define "banned books". I would think Hustler has to be universally "banned" in all US schools, it has to be in the top 10 most banned books. Or maybe because it's a magazine Hustler doesn't count so the author left it out...
The only books I can think of that are actually banned, as in it's against the law to obtain, in the US would be like a B2 bomber capability manual or some other classified documentation.
If you look at their definition, it's when the book is "missing" from the book selection, so it's essentially filtered out from a curated list, not an outright ban.
The school won't kick you out for having the book, but they won't buy it.
Your quotes around the missing do a lot of work here. From the FAQ:
> PEN America defines a school book ban as any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by lawmakers or other governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished. Diminished access is a form of censorship and has educational implications that extend beyond a title’s removal. Accessibility forms the core of PEN America’s definition of a school book ban and emphasizes the multiple ways book bans infringe on the rights of students, professional educators, and authors. It is important to recognize that books available in schools, whether in a school or classroom library, or as part of a curriculum, were selected by librarians and educators as part of the educational offerings to students. Book bans occur when those choices are overridden by school boards, administrators, teachers, or politicians, on the basis of a particular book’s content.
In particular it's when the decisions of the professionals are being overruled for political purposes.
It is particularly clear when reading the list, many of these books are children/young adults books which have won highest national and international awards, but somehow they are "age inappropriate"?
> The Bible ... it's probably the most consequential piece of literature ever written.
Even if you really dial in your definition of "consequential", ie. the amount of stagnated technological and societal progress and murder as a result of the Bible's adherents' efforts, this seems an absurd claim.
Most consequential piece of literature is likely the Plimpton 322 or Euclid's Elements or The Epic Of Gilgamesh. The Bible is an embarrassing footnote.
Seems like most of the books deal with complex real-world issues like sexual identity, racism, school shootings, etc. and are banned due to "sexual" or "violent" content. My guess is these criteria can be selectively interpreted to target books that go against political or cultural beliefs but there is obviously some merit to wanting to protect young kids from certain topics. I wish the article mentioned what ages the books are banned for because that seems like an important piece of data. I'm assuming it includes all K-12 public schools?
That's part of the issue. With Idaho it's black and white. Under 18, these books are banned.
I'd agree with limiting access based on age, but a lot of these laws have a binary if not outright ban on library access.
What's appropriate to a 10, 12, 14, and 16 year old is pretty broad as these kids mature fast in a few short years. I see no reason why any 16 year old should be restricted from any book.
I was.. precocious as a youngster and read books that were far above my grade level and what most adults would consider to be "safe" for children.
The first time I tried to check out one of those very adult books the librarian called my parents and asked if it was OK. My parents said "Yes. Let him have whatever he wants." They made a note in my account and the next day they let me have have whatever I wanted.
If that hadn't happened I would be a very different, and much dumber, person now.
I don't understand what the issue is with just asking the parents?
I suspect that most of the people responsible for these "bans" don't want that to happen because some parents will approve of things they don't. Most of this really IS an attempted ban rather than just "appropriate age related content" issue. They don't want to control what THEIR kids can see. They want to control what YOUR kids can see.
Because the modern system is that the parenting has been offloaded onto the school. The reason we have sex-ed is because we can't trust parents to do that.
The notion that the school board would simply ask a parent, then deal with the parents from kid A complaining that they read a book checked out by kid B is out there.
We run our schools to a lowest common denominator system.
I think that's a good system. Simply marking an age range for a book and contacting parents if they stray out seems like a more than acceptable way to handle things.
Agree it shouldn't be so binary. Only thing I'd add is that I believe it makes sense for schools to err towards restricting books until the upper age limit of "appropriate" because parents who choose to expose their kids to those topics earlier can still do so (e.g. by borrowing the book from the public library or giving their kid more permissive internet access) without having tax dollars used to undermine the values of those who don't. It's not an easy issue but for better or worse, I'd bet what books schools "ban" actually has fairly little impact on what kids are exposed to, so this might all be increasingly a mute point.
The controversy comes from parents disagreeing about which topics and books public schools should protect children from. If some parents want certain books removed and others want them kept, whose preferences should prevail? Should we give a minority a veto over books the majority finds valuable?
I wonder how the proponents of banning books like this don't have an "Are we the baddies?" moment. What precedent is there for history to look kindly on this type of behavior? Is there a single fiction book that you can point to that was banned in that past that let's say 60% of people today would agree was necessary (i.e. it would be in schools if there wasn't a ban) and appropriate to ban? It always seems like within a generation or two, most people agree the prior efforts to ban books were wrong, then a little time elapses, and we start banning new books again.
The people screaming at school board meetings about gay characters in books aren't going to have an "are we the baddies" moment. They'd just ban gay people from existing in public entirely if they could.
school boards are elected, county and state governments are elected, if you want a policy changed at a school then change it. This is like saying a policy requiring a school uniform bans wearing flip-flops. Here's the top 10 list of banned shoes...
Call me when you're arrested or fined for buying/selling any book in US.
It's interesting that people are responding like this rather than answering my question. I know how democracy works and that includes the occasional instances of tyranny of the majority.
That still doesn't address my original question. Is there historic precedent for this type of micromanaging of school libraries (if you're adamant that we shouldn't use the B word) that most of us would still agree with today? Because many of the books on the list seem more likely to follow the path of eventual school classics like The Grapes of Wrath or To Kill a Mockingbird than they are to continue to be banned decades into the future.
Freedom of speech (in the US) protects book publishing too, or do you think school boards are elected, county and state governments are above the constitution?
Curation is not the issue. The librarians already selected and purchased the books, the state is forcing the librarians to remove them for political reasons. The state could hire qualified activist librarians who only want politically conservative "approved" books who curate only those books, but I will let you guess why they can't find qualified conservative librarians.
I'm very sorry but a bunch of bigots getting on the school board still shouldn't be able to unilaterally say "there must be absolutely no representation of gay people in any books in the library because the presence of LGBT content is pornographic."
I am not a proponent of any of these bans, but it seems like someone needs to decide which books are featured at schools, and these 'bans' are just vetoes of certain books enacted by parents or school boards. I am not sure why a librarian or some school administrator should have complete authority to select any books they may prefer. This seems similar to a curriculum, in that the citizens and/or school board direct the educators what they should be (and should not be) teaching.
See the others here not only justifying the censorship, but downplaying that they're even censored. "Oh they're just not stocked? It's not a ban.", etc.
How are children supposed to develop into adults, if they are denied reading about the experiences of others?
There are no "banned books" in the US. Using that term is inaccurate, and IMO a bit of an insult to people living in countries that actually do ban books.
What there actually are, are books that schools refuse to carry in their libraries because they don't think the content is appropriate for children. I would assume this happens in every country.
>books that schools refuse to carry in their libraries
You are just fundamentally wrong on the facts here. This list is specifically books that were removed from libraries due to outside forces. I'm not worried about school librarians deciding that a book's content makes it unsuitable for their students. These are situations in which parents or government officials are telling the school to remove a book already present.
One argument I've also heard in this regard is that at some level editorial decisions MUST be made. A local library cannot hold EVERY book. So, which ones must you include and which ones shouldn't you stock? That's obviously going to become a political question, but it's also important to remember that it's an unavoidable one.
Where does “ban” end and “parental controls” begin? These books aren’t banned any more than R-rated movies are banned on Disney+. Every one of the books on the list has some kind of mature theme that different parents will feel differently about what age is the right age to handle it.
Except the definition used in the article, a ban is when a parent group disagrees with the authorities (the librarians) and does not want the book in a tax-payer funded library: "PEN America defines a school book ban as any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished."
So if a librarian goes to a conference and learns, "hey we need to remove these books from the lirbary because they are bigoted/racist/problematic" and they do so, that is not a book ban. But if parents say, "hey this book is not appropriate for our kids, this should not be in a school library", and they raise hell to get it removed, that is a book ban. The whole framing is dumb.
That seems insane to me. There are plenty of bisexual individuals that children will encounter in the real-world no. I could sympathize with banning of books that are of a certain obscenity but if purely because they are bisexual that sounds unhinged
That was the underlying motivation of a lot of these book bans and why they were so open ended. The idaho law explicitly calls out "homosexuality" as a reason for removing a book.
Bigots want there to be no visible LGBT people in society. "Your child will encounter a gay person someday" is not an argument they care about because they would also like to ensure that gay people cannot be visible in other parts of society.
There is a part of me seriously considering making a bookshelf dedicated to all of these banned books.
I don't understand the logic of banning these books, do they act like the internet doesn't exist? Kids will find this information, I found plenty of information about being gay 20ish years ago in high school.
Then again being short sited is one of their strong suits.
(Not downplaying banned books, I just can't understand thinking it is a good idea)
You don't need to as they aren't banned and your local bookstore likely already has a shelf right up front of all of these books for purchase.
I am against the banning of books from purchase or from public libraries, however banning books in schools is not that. It is gatekeeping this information from young and impressionable minds, just like we do with movies, games, drugs, all sorts of things. Things that may have negative consequences on developing minds.
You may disagree with what books are banned or why, but allowing unsupervised exposure of elementary aged children to sexually explicit and graphically depicted books such as Gender Queer is not appropriate. If a child wants access to this, their parent or adult can buy it for them or rent it from the public library.
> There is a part of me seriously considering making a bookshelf dedicated to all of these banned books.
That's great idea, many stores have them!
This is not about bookstores but about school. So then, would you put that bookshelf in a second grade class. How early do kids need to hear about "Five troubled teenagers fall into prostitution as they search for freedom, safety, community, family, and love". I mean, a lot of those kids still believe in Santa maybe telling them about teenage prostitutes is a bit early.
You should do that, and afterward, add some Funkos to accentuate it, especially for the #1 title on the list, Looking for Alaska, by John Green. His multi-talented brother Hank made this, BTW (the music, specifically, not the animation): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItBDepGyfK0
The reason to ban books is so that people that wouldn't normally cross paths with that book will never be affected by it.
Book bans are not designed to stop people that know about these books and the ideas they contain. They know that those people will still find them and read them.
> I found plenty of information about being gay 20ish years ago in high school.
Lots of kids didn't and they don't know they didn't and that is the point.
I mean I get that point and I get what they think they are doing.
But (well until the last couple of years) you would have still seen "different" people on tv and in movies.
And I get that the point is to make it so the kids are not being exposed to different ideas and beliefs. I am just struggling to understand how that is actually a realistic idea in todays world.
It's not there because it is readily available in many US public and college libraries. If it isn't in your institution's collection your librarian will happily help you order it from from a nearby one.
Librarians around the US have been doing mass purges of older books, especially politically sensitive older books and often for political reasons. There’s lots of news on this, if you’re interested. The problem also exists in Canada. I just checked my local library SYSTEM- consisting of about a dozen libraries - and it is in fact nowhere in there. It’s possible that, were my ILL privileges not restricted for “excessive use” (I don’t read new books, so nearly all my checkouts were ILl), that they would condescend to get it to me that way. Of course, they might not. And ILL has tighter restrictions and is more inconvenient. The primary mission of libraries today is not education, preservation of knowledge, or even literacy. The old mission statements are all dead. It’s entertainment and community support.
Either way, this is a silly argument. All these “banned” books are also readily available in your public library - they’re pop lit, your local library likely has more copies of Maas than all the Greek writers of antiquity combined.
Edit: on page 2 of 11, I have already counted 62 copies of Sarah J Maas book. As an institution for serving the public entertainment, my library system is doing great.
Considering your hallucinations about "mass purges of older books" I would consider your claim about Mein Kampf not being found in your "local library SYSTEM" as bs. You haven't checked, don't know how to check, or don't know what a "local library SYSTEM" is. It is unfortunate that utter falsehoods about how public libraries work are used to justify or somehow "balance" banning books about adolescence.
It’s unfortunate that people believe modern libraries are the educational and literary sanctums envisioned by their founders rather than modern entertainment and community centers.
Search for “deaccessioning” and “equity based weeding” and you will find all the information you could wish for. The classics are being thrown into dumpsters or pulped to make room for more computers and Sarah J Maas. In one particularly egregious Canadian case, all books published before 2008 were destroyed. In many cases this is politically driven.
Perhaps you know how the use to work, but not how they do now. It’s very grim. Many invaluable niche works, particularly of local history but also of technical subjects, have now been destroyed forever by librarians. The assumption too is that everything is probably digitized somewhere so it doesn’t even matter. Cultural and political and funding concerns as actual literacy has declined have completely subsumed that original purpose of libraries.
> You haven't checked, don't know how to check, or don't know what a "local library SYSTEM" is.
There’s no need to call me a liar. I read quite a lot and end up buying nearly all my books nowadays because the library system rarely had even very notable older books, but I still check. It takes about 30 seconds to type into the collection search bar. I did, in fact, look before I wrote that comment. Perhaps you should have not been so sure when you wrote your original comment that it was definitely there. Meanwhile, Maas has at least several dozen and I would suppose a few hundred copies of her books in the system. So, according to you it’s no big deal if the book is in the public library - well I can assure you Maas is several times more likely to be in any local public library than Hitler, so it sounds like there’s nothing to be concerned about. Your comment is entirely applicable to these Maas books: “ its not there because it is readily available in many US public and college libraries. If it isn't in your institution's collection your librarian will happily help you order it from from a nearby one.”
Or Space Relations, a book by the father of the president's former lawyer and attorney general (who himself was a huge player in Epstein circles), which was about a society of "elites" who engage in sex trafficking of minors.
> 6. Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher. 126 bans.
For those unaware, this book, and the ensuing Netflix original, was one colossal
> gee, who could have possibly anticipated this?
The book is about a depressed teenage girl who commits suicide after mailing boxes of recordings to the peers whom she felt wronged her, where she outlines the ways in which they are responsible for her "unaliving" herself. The book glamorizes teenage suicide, specifically of white teenage girls (as for reasons unclear, Jay Asher just had to disregard "write what you know" in favor of making the protagonist be both female and not Jewish), achieving a kind of retribution and redemption through suicide.
Not only did this book get published and mass marketed to youths, Netflix actually greenlit it, despite warnings from experts, and after decades of the news media exercising extreme caution and tact over reporting on teen suicide, given the well-established risks of copycat contagion. The result?
This is the most Hacker News thread ever. Endless comments from people who didn't read the article, the criteria, and in some cases apparently the title, leaping in to shout about how these books aren't banned.
Really? I think you should get reported and banned for this comment.
...By which I mean people should be free to speak about it and to vote it in whatever way they deem. See, the words we use have meanings, and stretching them to benefit our agenda is a shitty thing to do.
Depends on how big the chilling effect is, no? For example, if a school librarian notices that a colleague in another district loses their job or worse, gets personal threats because of a specific book, they might well remove a book from shelves before it's challenged.
That is not a rebuttal to your point -- I don't have a guess on whether or not the chilling effect is significant. I'm just noting there are follow-on effects to be considered.
My point is we all need to moderate our reactions to things based on actual scale, across the political spectrum rare events are being amplified to make people think they're prevalent disasters and it distorts too many peoples' reality.
There are much worse, much bigger problems and we need to constantly be reminding people of how big issues actually are. Book bannings are concerning but what is the size of the actual impact? I see this issue more of as an embarrassment for a handful of schools and boards who are bowing to moralizing fools, people are acting like they're afraid of an escalation to Fahrenheit 451 when we really should be mocking the book banners for their foolishness instead of being afraid of them.
This is far from the only issue suffering from a lack of sense of scale.
It goes far beyond that. The Iowa legislature has already moved to make changes to how libraries work in Iowa as a result of all of the attention these issues are getting here. They're essentially trying to condense the power to the state level instead of at the municipal level, where it belongs. It's a power grab that'll have repercussions that may very well cause the smallest of libraries here to cease existing.
And it all started with people complaining about books in the library.
I don't disagree with the underlying point, I just don't agree that the effects of this particular issue are all that minimal. Mockery only gets you so far when the moralizing fools are, say, serving as Speaker of the House.
Probably also worth asking if this problem is really independent, or if it's a facet of larger, more clearly damaging trends.
Really depends on the size of the school districts. There are districts with more than a 100,000 students and there are those with barely 100.
This is like saying "there are only 147 cities and towns who voted for X while 15,000 towns didn't, therefore X is very unpopular" without taking into account how many voters live in those cities/towns.
The intellectual laziness I am seeing here is horrifying. Look I get that many of the HN crowd does not like "woke" ideology, but you should recognize that perhaps a book or some form of free expression you like will be banned in the future when the political winds change. In the US we are eroding constitutional norms due to democratic backsliding. The hard fought freedoms will be hard to get back and you don't know what part of the fence you will be on in the aftermath.
My journey into professional software development was due to the efforts of the GNU organization that provided high quality compilers and tools along with a legal structure to promote the creation of more free software. The innovation was that code is speech and is protected by the first amendment (in the US). I have watched the software community devolve into just corrupt thievery due to the silicon valley "as long as I get rich, I am good" culture. That culture is seeping into every aspect of our social lives leading to deep enshittification. Monopolization of the means of artistic expression due to financialization is ruining everything.
Banning books in a school is much more performative these days than in times past. Kids these days can pirate the books, find them at a store, order them from Amazon, etc. In the old days the concern might have been that kids would get access to the wrong ideas -- and crucially, you might actually be able to prevent that sort of access.
Now, it seems to be be more about representation: "Do we want to say our school supports the ideas in this book?"
I'm not defending book banning, but people seem to treat book banning as if it's still the 1950s, and schools are really censoring information in any sort of meanginful way. Instead, all the schools are doing is taking a stand and saying "this book does not represent us."
Mind you, I still think this is bad, but I'm a bit baffled why people treat this topic the way they do.
Once again feels like terrible overreach of the so-called nanny state under the guise of "think of the children!".
Parents should be the ultimate authority on what kind of media their child consumes, and they should be responsible. Afterall legally children are basically an extension of the adult who is responsible for them
I'd bet 90-ish percent of these banned books could be made available to 90% or so of U.S. schoolchildren within a month-ish - if a bunch of anti-book-banning idealists cared to chip in donations to buy up publication rights, then publish the books on a simple readbannedbooks.org web site.
It doesn't seem like it's directly book ban, and more of a selection of books that are deemed inappropriate for kids according to the school which Pen disagrees with.
Popular banned books like Lolita, mein kampf are not here, but they are also not in U.S. schools. There are also no books listed here that schools definitely (for good reason) do not have, like COVID denialism, cult books, etc.
I'm happy to be proven wrong in the comments though, this is just from my cursory look at how they define it.
We can't. Any means of effectively protecting schoolchildren from school shootings would by definition be an abridgement of the public's right to keep and bear arms, and thus unconstitutional.
For some reason the First Amendment is a lot more negotiable for the American public than the second, so banning books will probably never be as politically intractable as banning guns in the US.
Remember, Hacker News posters were wildly in favor of banning the discussion of the Lab Leak theory. Only a few spoke out against such bans and they were commonly met with floods of downvotes. There's lots of support in this community for controlling access to information and shaping narratives as long as it conforms to their particular ideology.
My favorite part of this argument is that the "It's not a ban" folks always insist "But but parents authority"
Mhmm, and what about when those parents are wrong? Does the state not have a duty to educate people even when parents think that the moon landing is a hoax or plate tectonics aren't real?
When your parent is an insane person, sometimes a school is your only protection.
But so many conservatives find this unconscionable. How dare you! Parents can never be wrong!
The point of public schools is to make an educated populace. Not a populace that only knows what their parents want them to know.
Yes, this means that your kids might learn something you disagree with! The horror! Something like "America is a republic, not a democracy" like I was taught, or "slavery wasn't that bad" like a lot in the south are taught.
Ah, turns out they never really cared that people were getting taught things their parents didn't agree with. Only when children are taught things contrary to fundamentalist christian beliefs.
The point of education is so that your child can see multiple narratives and make their own choices, so they can learn to evaluate narratives and figure out which might have substance and which might just be nonsense. But the people who start their children into church before they can form full sentences really seem to hate that idea.
I find the dishonesty really off-putting. None of these books are "banned". School libraries don't stock them, they might be removed from curricula, but they are not "banned".
It's just so bizarre to make an argument (A very valid one!) about freedom of information by openly lying to the public.
"Book bans occur when those choices are overridden by school boards, administrators, teachers, or politicians, on the basis of a particular book’s content."
Librarians and teachers choose books, then some external party forces them to be removed. If you don't like the term "banned", choose a term you like better.
Would you, as a school librarian, select a book that describes how black people are lesser, and dumber than white people? Is this something you'd want kids to read?
>I find the dishonesty really off-putting. None of these books are "banned". School libraries don't stock them, they might be removed from curricula, but they are not "banned"
You can look into it, if you're curious! Some of these books are indeed banned from schools (even if they want to stock it!), by state-level law no less! It's not a curation choice.
There's state-level law saying it's illegal to own or read some books on this list? Or just that it's illegal for school libraries to stock it and/or include it in curricula?
>There's state-level law saying it's illegal to own or read some books on this list?
Sorry, I'll edit my comment to be more clear. It is illegal for school libraries to stock it, even if they (teachers, the district, the parents, etc.) want it to be carried.
As a reminder for readers, the title of the article contains "in U.S. schools". It is probably a safe assumption to use that context for the comments in this thread.
We're talking about an article titled "The Most Banned Books _in U.S. Schools_", I thought the "in U.S. schools" part provided the context, but I suppose not.
This list is very obviously politically motivated. None of these are banned. I can find them trivially on Amazon. My benchmark for "ban" would be a black out from common resellers.
There are common themes among all of them. All of them, your average parent, would rather their children not be exposed to in school. This list is more like "what should/shouldn't be acceptable for kids and teens". This is hardly a ban. It's at best parental control. But selling it as a ban is key to outrage culture and delivering their opinions about the current administration. Nothing is stopping a parent from purchasing these books for their child. Nothing is stopping them from finding them as a PDF, or at a local or online reseller. Pretending this is "taboo" information is an extremely poor attempt to hide political bikeshedding.
How does a “book ban” in a school work? The school is presumably only going to have a limited set of books. If I wanted to ban a book I’d just make it seem like a resource reorganization. “Oh we’re just focusing more on educational content around mathematics. These trans books will come around in a later reorg” and so on.
Is it like if you bring the book to school you’ll be sent home or something?
Thank you. That's actually quite helpful. So it affects book selection at the library but actual ownership and bringing the book to school are unaffected. I understand why the opponents of these 'bans' call them that, but it's funny that the proponents do as well. One would imagine their goals better served through deception.
My high school would pull the book from the shelf but make it still available by request. Before the start of the next school year, it would be placed back on the shelf. Typically, whoever complained the previous year would have moved on to other things by then.
Reminder: a "book ban" is simply when a there is book that is acclaimed by the establishment, available in book stores across America, on the shelves of thousands of school libraries, but somewhere, some school board, or parent group does not want it in their curriculum or a tax-payer funded library. A "book ban" is parents and taxpayers overriding curation the decisions of government librarians.
It is simply a Russell conjugation: librarians curate books; parents and school boards ban books.
Personally, I don't trust librarians or school boards, and I put a lot of work into curating reading material for my own children. Many of the books I value are out-of-print, or unavailable in any public library, whereas almost all these so-called "banned books" are available in most public libraries. So yeah, these lists get a giant eye-roll from me.
I hate the current trend in histrionic social media. A ‘banned book’ is one that you are not allowed to own by the State. You face fines, detention, interrogation, prison, torture, execution. Examples are 1984, The Satanic Verses. Countries that maintain book bans are Iran, China, Russia, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan.
Your school not stocking books you want is not a ban. It’s the prerogative of the institution to choose how it shapes minds. It cannot avoid taking on some angle, since any incomplete collection is an editorial choice.
"The law, which went into effect July 1, requires that a book be removed from all public schools in the state if at least three school districts (or at least two school districts and five charter schools) determine it amounts to “objective sensitive material”"
It seems like there may be more similar laws, per sibling comment.
>Aren't there other books that are banned for legitimate reasons like hate speech and racial hate that aren't included here?
I don't know, and I'm not sure how it is related to my comment. I did not create the list in the article and I don't maintain any other list of banned books.
Florida bill 1069 allows parents to challenge the inclusion of books in the library, but only explicitly identifies books related to sexual preferences/conduct/etc.
The state is not an "external party" to a school. Schools are run by the state; they are not sovereign or independent entities empowered to make their own decisions.
Why are elected officials and parents "external parties" to the education of their children, while librarians are.. "internal"? What gives one, but not the other, the moral authority to decide what kind of education to give children (compelled by law to attend public school)?
Librarians actually read the books and are experts in the curation of the books. It is not actually about moral authority it is about expertise.
Special accommodations are made for students. Parents can ask for their child not to participate in activities they deem inappropriate. I see this happen all of the time during Halloween events. It would be nice if Christian conservatives would do the same.
> It is not actually about moral authority it is about expertise.
I sure am glad that there is an Objectively Correct set of books children should be exposed to, unaffected by issues of identity, politics, or morality, and it's just a matter of applying dispassionate expertise to discover it.
And of course, that this is what librarians are doing, and not letting their personal beliefs interfere.
It sounds like you are trying to say there is no such thing as expertise. These people have degrees in education and/or library science. Why bother going to university to learn anything then?
No, I am saying there is no such objectively correct set of books. Hiding behind "expertise" doesn't make educational decisions less political. Children can be indoctrinated more, or less, "expertly".
But then everyone knows this, and I don't for a second believe you or anyone else thinks school librarians make decisions entirely based on universal (i.e. not specific to any country, ethnic group, or political persuasion) dispassionate principles. You're only pretending to to win an argument, then you'll go right back to believing the opposite, and call for libraries to be "decolonized" [1].
I guess we're lucky libraries are expert and objective now, unlike how they were 3 years ago when they were biased and needed decolonizing. Except the ones that haven't decolonized yet, of course. Those librarians' expertise and judgment can still be questioned.
There is a difference between a professional academic librarians managing a collection and political activists suppressing societal critiques and marginalized identities.
The reference you posted is about collection management at libraries London School of Economics in England. England has different history with respect to colonization than the US. A sordid history in-fact. We are also talking books for adults not children under 18.
The US itself is was decolonization project. I hope you know that colonialism is rarely judged a good thing in modern scholarship.
Librarians and schools have always been able to curate their collections as they see fit. The issue here is the state is now getting directly involved which has very little precedent since the Red Scare.
I thought the countries you listed as maintaining book bans was a little short, given that basically every Western/First World/Global North country has previously banned or continues to ban books. For instance, Belgium, Finland, France, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, South Korea, and the United States have all banned the sale and publication of books within recent memory, with restrictions on the importation of books and potential detention and fines for people importing them, and there may have been legal challenges made to the authors and publishers of books.
The definition you gave for banning books does narrow it down a bit though. Restriction on the publication, sale, or importation isn't a ban, but possession is. Ah. I guess a book is only banned if you face legal consequences for owning it after purchase during the very limited window that it may appear on bookshelves. In that case, I can't say for certain that Australia, Canada, Germany, and New Zealand bans books, but I can say that I would not want to be in possession of certain types of books in these countries. The definition of 'banned books' gets a little murky here though, is the inevitable police detention and interrogation due to the possession of the books themselves or rather obscenity/hate speech/Nazism/terrorism/drug laws? Does it count if the detention and interrogation occurs after an unrelated search of your property? Is a book only banned if it is confiscated from your possession? Does it count if you win your court case?
Which leaves the only Western nations that fit such a definition as being Austria and the United Kingdom, which do objectively criminalise the possession of banned books.
Non-stocked by schools? That's literally what is happening.
Prevented to be stocked? Library removed?
What should we call it when you can legally acquire the book, read and share it with other people with no concern from the law or authorities whatsoever? Do you think the correct word for this is "banned"?
We have, broadly speaking, two groups deciding which books to make available to children using taxpayer money - the voters/parents/elected officials, and unelected librarians. If one of those groups decides to withhold a book from schoolchildren, it's fine and not a ban. But if another does the same, then it's a ban.
Or am I completely wrong, and Jared Taylor's "White Identity" is available in every school library, explaining its absence from "banned" book lists?
Since many are asking what a "ban" is in this context, the site has a FAQ: https://pen.org/book-bans/book-bans-frequently-asked-questio...
The gist: Books that were previously available but removed due to pressure from outside (or other teachers)
> PEN America defines a school book ban as any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished.
So I think one thing to keep in mind is that books added or removed from shelves based on the editorial choices of the library staff is not considered a book ban - and it's why books like Mein Kampf or Lolita don't also show up on these lists despite being very intentionally kept off the shelves by librarians.
Oftentimes school districts or libraries already have a system in place where offensive or non age-appropriate books can have restrictions placed on it based on parent or student feedback.
All this to say I think it makes book bans a bit muddier - in some instances they might be legitimate pushback on aggressive editorialization by librarians. But in most instances, they are self-obviously performative and unnecessary.
"it's why books like Mein Kampf or Lolita don't also show up on these lists despite being very intentionally kept off the shelves by librarians."
It seems like they would count those books as being banned if they had a means for gathering the information.
"Since 2021, there have been numerous accounts of quiet removals of books in libraries and classrooms by teachers and librarians. School districts have started issuing preemptive bans through 'do not buy' lists, barring titles from ever entering their libraries. . . . Therefore, PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans is best thought of as a minimum count of book banning trends. This is a similar conclusion to that of the American Library Association, which routinely estimates that its counts reflect only a portion of the true number of books banned in schools."
> All this to say I think it makes book bans a bit muddier - in some instances they might be legitimate pushback on aggressive editorialization by librarians. But in most instances, they are self-obviously performative and unnecessary.
You could easily make those arguments on the book bans themselves.
One common argument I've seen floated in these conversations is that whatever this you call this behavior, it's not that bad because there are lots of other means to access the banned books.
But if that's the case - why bother in the first place? Is it all just performative virtue signaling that has no measurable effect on children's means to access these books? If not, shouldn't we be interrogating their reasoning?
In a controlled and editorialized context in the high school senior and college contexts (age 17+), Mein Kampf, Ted Kaczynski, and Marx should be taught to critically dissect bad ideas and immoral political prescriptions because it's important to teach future generations how to recognize and resist awful ideologies. Not doing so invites vulnerability to history rhyming more than it needs to.
Filtering content for children is not 'banning books'.
By this definition, The Bible is the most "banned book" across the country, even though it's probably the most consequential piece of literature ever written.
This continuous doublespeak is even more humorous considering the site has actual shopping links to every 'banned book'.
Agreed, this is very politically charged. The method for qualifying a "banned book" is not described in detail and seems to only include those with a political lean, when there are obviously other books that aren't shown to kids that didn't make the list.
The system they're using is in their faq, in detail. Basically it is books that were previously available but have been removed due to external pressure.
So it's not really fair to say it's a ban. You can have the book at school, but the school library won't have it.
Would you agree for the school to have the book "The Passing of the Great Race", a famously racist and white supremacist book in your school library?
Good things are good and bad things are bad.
I have absolutely no problem saying that bigots who insist that no books containing LGBT characters appear in libraries are bad people while also thinking that The Turner Diaries shouldn't be in public schools.
> who insist that no books containing LGBT characters appear in libraries
Is this a common stance? I thought it was more like, no books glorifying LGBT lifestyle or teaching it as if it’s not controversial and it’s just a fact of life (as proponents sincerely believe, of course, not saying no one is thinks it is a fact of life, that’s just the part that is controversial). I understand disagreeing with that, but it isn’t the same as opponents pushing for zero gay/etc characters period, right?
I haven’t been following this topic too closely though so I might be missing what people are screeching about on the right today.
My aunt is a Republican lobbyist. She believes that nobody is actually gay and that it is a mental illness where people are tricked into thinking it is possible to be gay and that this can originate from being exposed to gay people.
She has a bisexual daughter who has attempted suicide twice. She has told her daughter that she’d be better off dead than bi.
Also I’m very sorry if there are books that contain gay characters where there aren’t constant asides reminding the reader that these people are going to hell. The “gay lifestyle” is just gay people existing.
> glorifying LGBT lifestyle
What is an LGBT lifestyle?
My life before and after discovering the nature of my queerness is remarkably similar, though with a fair few more relationships and a lot less anguish afterwards.
Weasel words like those are usually used by people to distance themselves from outright hatred of the people they dislike. "Oh, I don't hate you for being LGBT, I just hate and disagree with your lifestyle, which is something that you chose." See, totally different!
The implication of "lifestyle" usually being "ability to exist in a society without any major obstacles due to being LGBT", "ability to receive true healthcare related to being LGBT", "ability to be legally recognized and accommodated as a result of it" or "ability to express your queerness in public without being seen as the villain".
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A very commonly banned book here in the United States - at least historically - is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. There's a specific chapter that my mind has returned to, again and again, in situations where anonymous cowards issue threats from behind the veil of anonymity:
https://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/book/the-ad...
The older I get, the more I think that there is wisdom in the words of Col. Sherburn on the cowardice of the average person.
By the way, I wonder if HN is aware of whose alt account this is. If they are, I wonder if they would punish the original poster for issuing threats on an anonymous account. I...admit that I don't have high hopes, but I live to be surprised.
For high school students, sure. I'd be very uncomfortable, but know thy enemy.
In my state (South Carolina) this is exactly how they handled it. If a parent or activist wishes see a book banned it goes through reviewed based on school-level appropriateness. A book like The Kite Runner with its deprecations of Bacha Bazi are a bit rough for a 5th grader but considered acceptable for a High Schooler given the cultural significance of the work.
As cryptically referred to by the villain in the perhaps most famous of American novels. Credit Wikipedia:
> Grant became a part of popular culture in 1920s America. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald made a lightly disguised reference to Grant in The Great Gatsby. In the book, the character Tom Buchanan reads a book called The Rise of the Colored Empires by "this man Goddard", a combination of Grant and his colleague Lothrop Stoddard. ...
> ... "Everybody ought to read it", the character said. "The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be — will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."
I don't know, I didn't come in here with particularly strong feelings about what "ban" means or should mean re books but people keep coming at me extremely hot for saying not much about it at all.
Personally I think using banned for "actively prevented from accessing in ways other books are not" makes plenty of sense even if you can effectively circumvent those attempts somehow.
The strict meaning that people seem to want to apply in here does not seem particularly useful to me. Almost no books have ever been banned by that standard, but there is a clearly organized movement in the US to remove all reference to queerness from public life. Flexible on nomenclature here but that context is very important.
It may seem like an attack on queer books, but as far as I can tell none of the straight books seem to be trying to explain how minors should get access to adult dating apps to meet older men, or showing obscene graphical depictions of sodomy involving children.
I think if librarians were buying "straight" books with the same explicit and adult content and putting them in elementary, middle, and high schools, the same parents would be complaining about those too.
The hell kind of library are you visiting?
What queer book with that content was in libraries?
I suspect that whatever example they had in mind, it's a passage that is descriptive of someone's personal experience while not being prescriptive in telling the reader step-by-step how to follow in their footsteps.
Is it currently there now?
>You can have the book at school, but the school library won't have it.
False.
Without the banning method this is just click bait to sell books. Every book on a ban list is still easily available. It would be weird for something as explicit as a kama sutra book to be found in an elementary school library. It might be appropriate at a high school library. But any kid at any time can go to a public library or book store and find just such a book. The parents get to decide when sexually explicit material is appropriate for their children. Schools do the same by proxy. There is nothing wrong with this setup.
The most targeted book in america is Looking For Alaska. You and I have a very different understanding of what "sexually explicit material" means if you think that this book is erotica.
Remember that the parents are deciding for other parents what appears in libraries.
Apparently I made my point poorly. Kama sutra was an example that I think everybody could agree shouldn't be in a children's library. My point was that everybody gets to decide what is in their children's library. Most of the people in that area probably agree. But, everybody can still go to any bookstore and find the same books. They are not banned in any way. As the OP said, without criteria on why a book is "banned" lists like this are pointless. A library or school district deciding they don't want a book doesn't make it banned. The problem is that people thousands of miles away think that those people far away are too restrictive or liberal in their book selections presented to children.
My second point was that since all these "banned" books are still available for sale; getting on a banned book list is just a tactic to sell more books. This list even has affiliate links to the books. Which make the whole page click bait.
Bigoted parents forcing librarians to remove books that they feel have educational merit because they offend the sensibilities of bigoted parents is bad.
You can call it a different word if you want I guess. But I'm absolutely baffled that people are spending their time worrying about the word "banned" here. This shit is awful.
every parent that is “pro” book banning is a shitty parent, period. I am kind of glad this book banning has spread as it helped me weed out some people from my life. life is to short to spend around shitty parents. I can pretty much live with any flaw (I have 100’s) but being a shitty parent is not one I am willing to be around
Conversations like these are so immensely frustrating to have on Hacker News.
This thread is full of people falling over themselves trying to convince you that a book ban isn't actually a book ban, and whatever it happens to be isn't that big of a deal.
If the banning of books from libraries isn't a big deal - why is it being done in the first place? Is it just virtue signaling, or does it have a specific objective? If it has a specific objective, isn't that objective worth interrogating instead of brushing off as not a big deal because the book is still available through other means?
I think it might be the literalism sometimes common with autistic spectrum. Uhm, not to cause offense, I relate to it?
As someone who is also on the spectrum, literalism explains confusion over the definition, but not the downplaying of the consequences.
The objective is a foothold in culture war stuff, largely around LGBT people but about other things too. The ultimate goal is to re-establish a culture where gay people are unable to be out in public, especially in places where there are children. This means no gay teachers. No gay characters in media. Websites with LGBT content being treated as pornographic and requiring age verification.
The narrative is "look at these liberals forcing sex on children." Parents go to school board meetings and read passages ripped from context as lurid eroticism to rile up their neighbors. If normies go along with this "think of the children" stuff then it becomes a foothold to the next steps. We've seen this trans people, where bigots have successfully converted "this is about girl's sports" into policies banning healthcare and safe bathroom use.
At this point it's extremely clear - objectively, by counting criminal convictions - which demographic is a real danger to kids, not just sexually but in many other ways.
And it's very much not the writers of books with LGBT content.
I can understand why the real culprits might want to deflect attention from their moral failings onto others, and why pointing out the facts might make them very, very angry.
But it's going to have to be done at some point.
1984
Not sure what your point is. 1984 is available at my middle school, high school and public libraries and every book store. Not available at elementary schools because it is generally above grade level.
I don't know what the poster's intention was but perhaps "Fahrenheit 451" would have made the point more clearly?
Nobody is going around hunting for banned books in all formats and destroying them let alone a government agency for that purpose.
Filtering content sounds like doublespeak for banning to me. The title is Top 52 Banned Books: The Most Banned Books in U.S. Schools, how is it that inaccurate?
Curation is not banning.
This is explicitly not curation.
because that would suggest something very bad is happening in the US and the HN party line is "this is nothing unusual, typical woke [1] panic attack over nothing, now please get back to your HN job of trying to win VC money"
[1] https://paulgraham.com/woke.html
At least in my mind it's unfair because the books are not in any way banned. Anyone can get them. They're more available than perhaps any time in history. The school's decision not to stock them may merit criticism, but the books are hardly "banned" in the traditional sense of the word.
99.99% of all books ever are not going to be available at your local library. But we don't consider those to be "banned" either. Here, the difference is that these books were selected and stocked in the past, but were removed due to political pressure - or these books weren't available, but a ruling from up above blanket banned their libraries from being able to consider them in the first place. It's frustrating to see so many people in this comment section equate these two.
Just because you can find those books online or elsewhere doesn't mean that the rulings to ban them from school libraries isn't about trying to restrict access to that information.
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The point the OP made was specifically to call out what they deemed as doublespeak of the word ban. I made no comment on why any given book is justifiably banned or "filtered".
> I certainly wouldn’t want my children getting exposed to books that normalise trans ideology, for example.
If you had a trans child?
Trans yourself?
> I certainly wouldn’t want my children getting exposed to books that normalise trans ideology, for example.
fortunately "trans ideology" is a nonexistent boogeyman made up by whatever vile youtube videos or FOX news you're watching, so there's no worry about such books existing
No, it is not lol.
You are literally spouting right wing book banner talking points.
"Suitable for children." Uh huh. According to your pastor.
You don't have to be a Bible thumper to think that certain things are inappropriate for kids.
Oh, for sure!
The problem is that the definition of "things that are inappropriate for kids" brought up by book-banners is almost always heavily inspired by religion. A book containing graphical violence and sex, like the Bible? Totally okay! A book containing casual day-to-day life, like mentioning in passing that little Johnny next door has two dads? Somehow completely inappropriate.
So your problem isn’t with “banning” books in schools per se. You just have a difference of opinion over which books should be “banned”.
They never said that. They just pointed out the hypocrisy of the situation, where certain topics normally deemed extremely controversial by those very figures become totally fine if they're brought up along the lines of their ideology. The comment contains no judgements on what should be included or excluded from their point of view.
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Why would the Bible meet that definition? It is generally available for children in school libraries.
Separation of church and state, especially when schools don’t allow alternative books (eg in some Bible Belt areas). Also, the bible does have violence, sex (including rape and incest), etc.
I understand there are reasons it could be banned, but I'm saying that in reality it is not. It is widely available in elementary and middle school libraries.
Except for one case in Texas that made a splash in the news last year, I didn't find other cases of the Bible being banned from school libraries. Did I miss something?
If not, it would make sense that Texas made the news because it's out of the ordinary.
I think OP is over-generalizing. The Bible is the most banned book around the world, but definitely not in the US.
Yeah this is a strange way to define "banned books". I would think Hustler has to be universally "banned" in all US schools, it has to be in the top 10 most banned books. Or maybe because it's a magazine Hustler doesn't count so the author left it out...
The only books I can think of that are actually banned, as in it's against the law to obtain, in the US would be like a B2 bomber capability manual or some other classified documentation.
Given the First Amendment, the only thing that I can think of as banned is copyright violations.
The Pentagon Papers case says that, once revealed, classified information can be published.
How about dangerous information. Want to know how to make a fusion bomb? Start at https://www.atomicarchive.com/science/fusion/index.html. More detailed schematics are easy to find.
All that said, I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Do most school libraries carry Hustler? Wow.
No.
But carrying it is unlikely to be against the law either.
>Yeah this is a strange way to define "banned books".
Pen clearly defines what they consider a ban. Hustler would not meet the definition (hint: it's not because its a magazine).
I expect the bible is in virtually every public and school library in the US. It’s hardly a banned book by any measure.
The title is .. "in US schools" . So in this context, yes it is.
You can argue banning or filtering some books for kids is the right thing to do, but the obvious question is then: what books and why?
Seems like you are fighting a strawman.
> Filtering content for children is not 'banning books'.
If "filtering content for children" is not banning books, then why is "filtering content for adults" banning books?
> By this definition, The Bible is the most "banned book" across the country
According to the source the high score is 147. Has the Bible been banned 148 times or more in the US?
ban
to forbid (= refuse to allow) something, especially officially
If you look at their definition, it's when the book is "missing" from the book selection, so it's essentially filtered out from a curated list, not an outright ban.
The school won't kick you out for having the book, but they won't buy it.
Your quotes around the missing do a lot of work here. From the FAQ:
> PEN America defines a school book ban as any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by lawmakers or other governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished. Diminished access is a form of censorship and has educational implications that extend beyond a title’s removal. Accessibility forms the core of PEN America’s definition of a school book ban and emphasizes the multiple ways book bans infringe on the rights of students, professional educators, and authors. It is important to recognize that books available in schools, whether in a school or classroom library, or as part of a curriculum, were selected by librarians and educators as part of the educational offerings to students. Book bans occur when those choices are overridden by school boards, administrators, teachers, or politicians, on the basis of a particular book’s content.
In particular it's when the decisions of the professionals are being overruled for political purposes.
It is particularly clear when reading the list, many of these books are children/young adults books which have won highest national and international awards, but somehow they are "age inappropriate"?
>The school won't kick you out for having the book, but they won't buy it.
You keep saying this all over this thread, can you please tell me how you are reaching this conclusion?
I have linked you to at least one entire state (covering 40+ school districts) where what you are saying is completely false.
Typically, if a school bans something, it also means that the children are not allowed to bring the banned thing onto the school premises.
> The Bible ... it's probably the most consequential piece of literature ever written.
Even if you really dial in your definition of "consequential", ie. the amount of stagnated technological and societal progress and murder as a result of the Bible's adherents' efforts, this seems an absurd claim.
Most consequential piece of literature is likely the Plimpton 322 or Euclid's Elements or The Epic Of Gilgamesh. The Bible is an embarrassing footnote.
Seems like most of the books deal with complex real-world issues like sexual identity, racism, school shootings, etc. and are banned due to "sexual" or "violent" content. My guess is these criteria can be selectively interpreted to target books that go against political or cultural beliefs but there is obviously some merit to wanting to protect young kids from certain topics. I wish the article mentioned what ages the books are banned for because that seems like an important piece of data. I'm assuming it includes all K-12 public schools?
That's part of the issue. With Idaho it's black and white. Under 18, these books are banned.
I'd agree with limiting access based on age, but a lot of these laws have a binary if not outright ban on library access.
What's appropriate to a 10, 12, 14, and 16 year old is pretty broad as these kids mature fast in a few short years. I see no reason why any 16 year old should be restricted from any book.
I was.. precocious as a youngster and read books that were far above my grade level and what most adults would consider to be "safe" for children.
The first time I tried to check out one of those very adult books the librarian called my parents and asked if it was OK. My parents said "Yes. Let him have whatever he wants." They made a note in my account and the next day they let me have have whatever I wanted.
If that hadn't happened I would be a very different, and much dumber, person now.
I don't understand what the issue is with just asking the parents?
I suspect that most of the people responsible for these "bans" don't want that to happen because some parents will approve of things they don't. Most of this really IS an attempted ban rather than just "appropriate age related content" issue. They don't want to control what THEIR kids can see. They want to control what YOUR kids can see.
Because the modern system is that the parenting has been offloaded onto the school. The reason we have sex-ed is because we can't trust parents to do that.
The notion that the school board would simply ask a parent, then deal with the parents from kid A complaining that they read a book checked out by kid B is out there.
We run our schools to a lowest common denominator system.
That's the way it is, but is that the way it should be?
We had a better system once (maybe only in this one way). We can do it again.
I think that's a good system. Simply marking an age range for a book and contacting parents if they stray out seems like a more than acceptable way to handle things.
Agree it shouldn't be so binary. Only thing I'd add is that I believe it makes sense for schools to err towards restricting books until the upper age limit of "appropriate" because parents who choose to expose their kids to those topics earlier can still do so (e.g. by borrowing the book from the public library or giving their kid more permissive internet access) without having tax dollars used to undermine the values of those who don't. It's not an easy issue but for better or worse, I'd bet what books schools "ban" actually has fairly little impact on what kids are exposed to, so this might all be increasingly a mute point.
The controversy comes from parents disagreeing about which topics and books public schools should protect children from. If some parents want certain books removed and others want them kept, whose preferences should prevail? Should we give a minority a veto over books the majority finds valuable?
I wonder how the proponents of banning books like this don't have an "Are we the baddies?" moment. What precedent is there for history to look kindly on this type of behavior? Is there a single fiction book that you can point to that was banned in that past that let's say 60% of people today would agree was necessary (i.e. it would be in schools if there wasn't a ban) and appropriate to ban? It always seems like within a generation or two, most people agree the prior efforts to ban books were wrong, then a little time elapses, and we start banning new books again.
The people screaming at school board meetings about gay characters in books aren't going to have an "are we the baddies" moment. They'd just ban gay people from existing in public entirely if they could.
school boards are elected, county and state governments are elected, if you want a policy changed at a school then change it. This is like saying a policy requiring a school uniform bans wearing flip-flops. Here's the top 10 list of banned shoes...
Call me when you're arrested or fined for buying/selling any book in US.
It's interesting that people are responding like this rather than answering my question. I know how democracy works and that includes the occasional instances of tyranny of the majority.
That still doesn't address my original question. Is there historic precedent for this type of micromanaging of school libraries (if you're adamant that we shouldn't use the B word) that most of us would still agree with today? Because many of the books on the list seem more likely to follow the path of eventual school classics like The Grapes of Wrath or To Kill a Mockingbird than they are to continue to be banned decades into the future.
Freedom of speech (in the US) protects book publishing too, or do you think school boards are elected, county and state governments are above the constitution?
How does not stocking a book in a school library due to community complaints or even a state law conflict with the first amendment?
Curation is not the issue. The librarians already selected and purchased the books, the state is forcing the librarians to remove them for political reasons. The state could hire qualified activist librarians who only want politically conservative "approved" books who curate only those books, but I will let you guess why they can't find qualified conservative librarians.
I'm very sorry but a bunch of bigots getting on the school board still shouldn't be able to unilaterally say "there must be absolutely no representation of gay people in any books in the library because the presence of LGBT content is pornographic."
I am not a proponent of any of these bans, but it seems like someone needs to decide which books are featured at schools, and these 'bans' are just vetoes of certain books enacted by parents or school boards. I am not sure why a librarian or some school administrator should have complete authority to select any books they may prefer. This seems similar to a curriculum, in that the citizens and/or school board direct the educators what they should be (and should not be) teaching.
Well I certainly don't want school boards to determine the curriculum.
See the others here not only justifying the censorship, but downplaying that they're even censored. "Oh they're just not stocked? It's not a ban.", etc.
How are children supposed to develop into adults, if they are denied reading about the experiences of others?
There are no "banned books" in the US. Using that term is inaccurate, and IMO a bit of an insult to people living in countries that actually do ban books.
What there actually are, are books that schools refuse to carry in their libraries because they don't think the content is appropriate for children. I would assume this happens in every country.
>books that schools refuse to carry in their libraries
You are just fundamentally wrong on the facts here. This list is specifically books that were removed from libraries due to outside forces. I'm not worried about school librarians deciding that a book's content makes it unsuitable for their students. These are situations in which parents or government officials are telling the school to remove a book already present.
https://pen.org/book-bans/book-bans-frequently-asked-questio...
One argument I've also heard in this regard is that at some level editorial decisions MUST be made. A local library cannot hold EVERY book. So, which ones must you include and which ones shouldn't you stock? That's obviously going to become a political question, but it's also important to remember that it's an unavoidable one.
The books on this list are not considered banned because of decisions made by a librarian figuring out how to fill their limited space.
Even if the librarian (or in some cases, even if the school district) wants to place the book on the shelves, they are not allowed to.
Ah, that's good to understand, thank you for correcting me.
Where does “ban” end and “parental controls” begin? These books aren’t banned any more than R-rated movies are banned on Disney+. Every one of the books on the list has some kind of mature theme that different parents will feel differently about what age is the right age to handle it.
Probably when it's the parents making the decision for their own kids, not another authority.
Except the definition used in the article, a ban is when a parent group disagrees with the authorities (the librarians) and does not want the book in a tax-payer funded library: "PEN America defines a school book ban as any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished."
So if a librarian goes to a conference and learns, "hey we need to remove these books from the lirbary because they are bigoted/racist/problematic" and they do so, that is not a book ban. But if parents say, "hey this book is not appropriate for our kids, this should not be in a school library", and they raise hell to get it removed, that is a book ban. The whole framing is dumb.
Maas' Throne of Glass series? Why?
Being unfamiliar with the series, a short google makes me believe it's because some (a lot?) of the characters are bisexual.
That seems insane to me. There are plenty of bisexual individuals that children will encounter in the real-world no. I could sympathize with banning of books that are of a certain obscenity but if purely because they are bisexual that sounds unhinged
That was the underlying motivation of a lot of these book bans and why they were so open ended. The idaho law explicitly calls out "homosexuality" as a reason for removing a book.
It is not insane.
Bigots want there to be no visible LGBT people in society. "Your child will encounter a gay person someday" is not an argument they care about because they would also like to ensure that gay people cannot be visible in other parts of society.
> That seems insane to me.
That's because it is, and the people pushing for this are.
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There is a part of me seriously considering making a bookshelf dedicated to all of these banned books.
I don't understand the logic of banning these books, do they act like the internet doesn't exist? Kids will find this information, I found plenty of information about being gay 20ish years ago in high school.
Then again being short sited is one of their strong suits.
(Not downplaying banned books, I just can't understand thinking it is a good idea)
You don't need to as they aren't banned and your local bookstore likely already has a shelf right up front of all of these books for purchase.
I am against the banning of books from purchase or from public libraries, however banning books in schools is not that. It is gatekeeping this information from young and impressionable minds, just like we do with movies, games, drugs, all sorts of things. Things that may have negative consequences on developing minds.
You may disagree with what books are banned or why, but allowing unsupervised exposure of elementary aged children to sexually explicit and graphically depicted books such as Gender Queer is not appropriate. If a child wants access to this, their parent or adult can buy it for them or rent it from the public library.
> There is a part of me seriously considering making a bookshelf dedicated to all of these banned books.
That's great idea, many stores have them!
This is not about bookstores but about school. So then, would you put that bookshelf in a second grade class. How early do kids need to hear about "Five troubled teenagers fall into prostitution as they search for freedom, safety, community, family, and love". I mean, a lot of those kids still believe in Santa maybe telling them about teenage prostitutes is a bit early.
>There is a part of me seriously considering making a bookshelf dedicated to all of these banned books.
My local bookstore proudly features a table of "banned books" right at the entrance. It's a pretty good advertisement!
You should do that, and afterward, add some Funkos to accentuate it, especially for the #1 title on the list, Looking for Alaska, by John Green. His multi-talented brother Hank made this, BTW (the music, specifically, not the animation): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ItBDepGyfK0
The reason to ban books is so that people that wouldn't normally cross paths with that book will never be affected by it.
Book bans are not designed to stop people that know about these books and the ideas they contain. They know that those people will still find them and read them.
> I found plenty of information about being gay 20ish years ago in high school.
Lots of kids didn't and they don't know they didn't and that is the point.
I mean I get that point and I get what they think they are doing.
But (well until the last couple of years) you would have still seen "different" people on tv and in movies.
And I get that the point is to make it so the kids are not being exposed to different ideas and beliefs. I am just struggling to understand how that is actually a realistic idea in todays world.
But, gee willickers, where is Mein Kampf on the list?
Because they define a ban as books that were previously available but aren't, not books who were never available.
You also won't see The Passing of the Great Race in the list.
It's not there because it is readily available in many US public and college libraries. If it isn't in your institution's collection your librarian will happily help you order it from from a nearby one.
Librarians around the US have been doing mass purges of older books, especially politically sensitive older books and often for political reasons. There’s lots of news on this, if you’re interested. The problem also exists in Canada. I just checked my local library SYSTEM- consisting of about a dozen libraries - and it is in fact nowhere in there. It’s possible that, were my ILL privileges not restricted for “excessive use” (I don’t read new books, so nearly all my checkouts were ILl), that they would condescend to get it to me that way. Of course, they might not. And ILL has tighter restrictions and is more inconvenient. The primary mission of libraries today is not education, preservation of knowledge, or even literacy. The old mission statements are all dead. It’s entertainment and community support.
Either way, this is a silly argument. All these “banned” books are also readily available in your public library - they’re pop lit, your local library likely has more copies of Maas than all the Greek writers of antiquity combined.
Edit: on page 2 of 11, I have already counted 62 copies of Sarah J Maas book. As an institution for serving the public entertainment, my library system is doing great.
Considering your hallucinations about "mass purges of older books" I would consider your claim about Mein Kampf not being found in your "local library SYSTEM" as bs. You haven't checked, don't know how to check, or don't know what a "local library SYSTEM" is. It is unfortunate that utter falsehoods about how public libraries work are used to justify or somehow "balance" banning books about adolescence.
It’s unfortunate that people believe modern libraries are the educational and literary sanctums envisioned by their founders rather than modern entertainment and community centers.
Search for “deaccessioning” and “equity based weeding” and you will find all the information you could wish for. The classics are being thrown into dumpsters or pulped to make room for more computers and Sarah J Maas. In one particularly egregious Canadian case, all books published before 2008 were destroyed. In many cases this is politically driven.
Perhaps you know how the use to work, but not how they do now. It’s very grim. Many invaluable niche works, particularly of local history but also of technical subjects, have now been destroyed forever by librarians. The assumption too is that everything is probably digitized somewhere so it doesn’t even matter. Cultural and political and funding concerns as actual literacy has declined have completely subsumed that original purpose of libraries.
> You haven't checked, don't know how to check, or don't know what a "local library SYSTEM" is.
There’s no need to call me a liar. I read quite a lot and end up buying nearly all my books nowadays because the library system rarely had even very notable older books, but I still check. It takes about 30 seconds to type into the collection search bar. I did, in fact, look before I wrote that comment. Perhaps you should have not been so sure when you wrote your original comment that it was definitely there. Meanwhile, Maas has at least several dozen and I would suppose a few hundred copies of her books in the system. So, according to you it’s no big deal if the book is in the public library - well I can assure you Maas is several times more likely to be in any local public library than Hitler, so it sounds like there’s nothing to be concerned about. Your comment is entirely applicable to these Maas books: “ its not there because it is readily available in many US public and college libraries. If it isn't in your institution's collection your librarian will happily help you order it from from a nearby one.”
Or Space Relations, a book by the father of the president's former lawyer and attorney general (who himself was a huge player in Epstein circles), which was about a society of "elites" who engage in sex trafficking of minors.
That's not banned...I wonder why?
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It's hilarious that Barnes and Noble has a banned books section as a sort of marketing gimmick.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/b/banned-books/_/N-rtm
It makes you wonder what books Barnes and Noble has banned from being sold in their stores.
What an outrageous list!
Mostly books about young people confronting the problems facing young people
A window into the minds of adults. A distorted window, I hope, or there is no hole for those adults
Protect children? Stop abusing, punishing and condemning them for being children. But no, ban books that might give them clues on coping
What outrageous behavior, bless the librarians
> 6. Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher. 126 bans.
For those unaware, this book, and the ensuing Netflix original, was one colossal
> gee, who could have possibly anticipated this?
The book is about a depressed teenage girl who commits suicide after mailing boxes of recordings to the peers whom she felt wronged her, where she outlines the ways in which they are responsible for her "unaliving" herself. The book glamorizes teenage suicide, specifically of white teenage girls (as for reasons unclear, Jay Asher just had to disregard "write what you know" in favor of making the protagonist be both female and not Jewish), achieving a kind of retribution and redemption through suicide.
Not only did this book get published and mass marketed to youths, Netflix actually greenlit it, despite warnings from experts, and after decades of the news media exercising extreme caution and tact over reporting on teen suicide, given the well-established risks of copycat contagion. The result?
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/apr/30/teen-su...
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6817407/
Even reporting on adult suicides can be dicey: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
This is the most Hacker News thread ever. Endless comments from people who didn't read the article, the criteria, and in some cases apparently the title, leaping in to shout about how these books aren't banned.
Really? I think you should get reported and banned for this comment.
...By which I mean people should be free to speak about it and to vote it in whatever way they deem. See, the words we use have meanings, and stretching them to benefit our agenda is a shitty thing to do.
The number 1 banned book in this list has 147 bans... there are something like 15,000 school districts in the US.
This doesn't seem to be a particularly large problem.
Depends on how big the chilling effect is, no? For example, if a school librarian notices that a colleague in another district loses their job or worse, gets personal threats because of a specific book, they might well remove a book from shelves before it's challenged.
That is not a rebuttal to your point -- I don't have a guess on whether or not the chilling effect is significant. I'm just noting there are follow-on effects to be considered.
My point is we all need to moderate our reactions to things based on actual scale, across the political spectrum rare events are being amplified to make people think they're prevalent disasters and it distorts too many peoples' reality.
There are much worse, much bigger problems and we need to constantly be reminding people of how big issues actually are. Book bannings are concerning but what is the size of the actual impact? I see this issue more of as an embarrassment for a handful of schools and boards who are bowing to moralizing fools, people are acting like they're afraid of an escalation to Fahrenheit 451 when we really should be mocking the book banners for their foolishness instead of being afraid of them.
This is far from the only issue suffering from a lack of sense of scale.
It goes far beyond that. The Iowa legislature has already moved to make changes to how libraries work in Iowa as a result of all of the attention these issues are getting here. They're essentially trying to condense the power to the state level instead of at the municipal level, where it belongs. It's a power grab that'll have repercussions that may very well cause the smallest of libraries here to cease existing.
And it all started with people complaining about books in the library.
I don't disagree with the underlying point, I just don't agree that the effects of this particular issue are all that minimal. Mockery only gets you so far when the moralizing fools are, say, serving as Speaker of the House.
Probably also worth asking if this problem is really independent, or if it's a facet of larger, more clearly damaging trends.
PEN America accounts for that. You should read the following: https://pen.org/report/the-normalization-of-book-banning/#:~...
This does on account for soft bans like undisclosed do not buy lists. No need to ban what you are not allowed to buy.
Really depends on the size of the school districts. There are districts with more than a 100,000 students and there are those with barely 100.
This is like saying "there are only 147 cities and towns who voted for X while 15,000 towns didn't, therefore X is very unpopular" without taking into account how many voters live in those cities/towns.
The intellectual laziness I am seeing here is horrifying. Look I get that many of the HN crowd does not like "woke" ideology, but you should recognize that perhaps a book or some form of free expression you like will be banned in the future when the political winds change. In the US we are eroding constitutional norms due to democratic backsliding. The hard fought freedoms will be hard to get back and you don't know what part of the fence you will be on in the aftermath.
My journey into professional software development was due to the efforts of the GNU organization that provided high quality compilers and tools along with a legal structure to promote the creation of more free software. The innovation was that code is speech and is protected by the first amendment (in the US). I have watched the software community devolve into just corrupt thievery due to the silicon valley "as long as I get rich, I am good" culture. That culture is seeping into every aspect of our social lives leading to deep enshittification. Monopolization of the means of artistic expression due to financialization is ruining everything.
Banning books in a school is much more performative these days than in times past. Kids these days can pirate the books, find them at a store, order them from Amazon, etc. In the old days the concern might have been that kids would get access to the wrong ideas -- and crucially, you might actually be able to prevent that sort of access.
Now, it seems to be be more about representation: "Do we want to say our school supports the ideas in this book?"
I'm not defending book banning, but people seem to treat book banning as if it's still the 1950s, and schools are really censoring information in any sort of meanginful way. Instead, all the schools are doing is taking a stand and saying "this book does not represent us."
Mind you, I still think this is bad, but I'm a bit baffled why people treat this topic the way they do.
Once again feels like terrible overreach of the so-called nanny state under the guise of "think of the children!".
Parents should be the ultimate authority on what kind of media their child consumes, and they should be responsible. Afterall legally children are basically an extension of the adult who is responsible for them
I'd bet 90-ish percent of these banned books could be made available to 90% or so of U.S. schoolchildren within a month-ish - if a bunch of anti-book-banning idealists cared to chip in donations to buy up publication rights, then publish the books on a simple readbannedbooks.org web site.
They already are. They’re all mass pop lit on this list and the number of removals is very tiny.
It doesn't seem like it's directly book ban, and more of a selection of books that are deemed inappropriate for kids according to the school which Pen disagrees with.
Popular banned books like Lolita, mein kampf are not here, but they are also not in U.S. schools. There are also no books listed here that schools definitely (for good reason) do not have, like COVID denialism, cult books, etc.
I'm happy to be proven wrong in the comments though, this is just from my cursory look at how they define it.
> Popular banned books like Lolita, mein kampf are not here, but they are also not in U.S. school
Honest question: Are those books banned in schools?
The books that "require banning" are good children's books. Isn't that the point?
How about we protect schoolchildren from actual school shootings rather than books about school shootings? Just a thought.
We can't. Any means of effectively protecting schoolchildren from school shootings would by definition be an abridgement of the public's right to keep and bear arms, and thus unconstitutional.
For some reason the First Amendment is a lot more negotiable for the American public than the second, so banning books will probably never be as politically intractable as banning guns in the US.
What? Mein Kampf and Anarchists Cookbook didn't even make the list at all? Something's fishy here
Not necessarily. PEN describes a ban as a book being removed from a library. If Mein Kampf was never in the library, there's no Mein Kampf to remove.
Slaughterhouse-Five is required reading. I fail to see how Vonnegut is offensive to anyone except warmongers and ignorant rubes.
At least Iowa has largely went the other direction recently by removing it and Maus from absurd book bans.
Remember, Hacker News posters were wildly in favor of banning the discussion of the Lab Leak theory. Only a few spoke out against such bans and they were commonly met with floods of downvotes. There's lots of support in this community for controlling access to information and shaping narratives as long as it conforms to their particular ideology.
There is a difference between something being banned and preventing the spread of inaccuracies or misinformation (without suppressing any information)
It is well accepted that the lab-leak theory is highly improbable, and all of the evidence is that it came from the wet markets.
My favorite part of this argument is that the "It's not a ban" folks always insist "But but parents authority"
Mhmm, and what about when those parents are wrong? Does the state not have a duty to educate people even when parents think that the moon landing is a hoax or plate tectonics aren't real?
When your parent is an insane person, sometimes a school is your only protection.
But so many conservatives find this unconscionable. How dare you! Parents can never be wrong!
The point of public schools is to make an educated populace. Not a populace that only knows what their parents want them to know.
Yes, this means that your kids might learn something you disagree with! The horror! Something like "America is a republic, not a democracy" like I was taught, or "slavery wasn't that bad" like a lot in the south are taught.
Ah, turns out they never really cared that people were getting taught things their parents didn't agree with. Only when children are taught things contrary to fundamentalist christian beliefs.
The point of education is so that your child can see multiple narratives and make their own choices, so they can learn to evaluate narratives and figure out which might have substance and which might just be nonsense. But the people who start their children into church before they can form full sentences really seem to hate that idea.
I wonder why...
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I find the dishonesty really off-putting. None of these books are "banned". School libraries don't stock them, they might be removed from curricula, but they are not "banned".
It's just so bizarre to make an argument (A very valid one!) about freedom of information by openly lying to the public.
"Book bans occur when those choices are overridden by school boards, administrators, teachers, or politicians, on the basis of a particular book’s content."
https://pen.org/book-bans/book-bans-frequently-asked-questio...
This feels like the laziest take.
Librarians and teachers choose books, then some external party forces them to be removed. If you don't like the term "banned", choose a term you like better.
Would you, as a school librarian, select a book that describes how black people are lesser, and dumber than white people? Is this something you'd want kids to read?
> a book that describes how black people are lesser, and dumber than white people?
Which book was that?
The Passing of the Great Race Race, Evolution, and Behavior The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life
It's the one he's made up in his head to support his strawman argument that he's copying and pasting throughout this thread.
You're saying that you don't think a single book exists that pushes white supremacy? Really?
You can just buy your child these books if you really want them to read a Clockwork Orange
>I find the dishonesty really off-putting. None of these books are "banned". School libraries don't stock them, they might be removed from curricula, but they are not "banned"
You can look into it, if you're curious! Some of these books are indeed banned from schools (even if they want to stock it!), by state-level law no less! It's not a curation choice.
There's state-level law saying it's illegal to own or read some books on this list? Or just that it's illegal for school libraries to stock it and/or include it in curricula?
>There's state-level law saying it's illegal to own or read some books on this list?
Sorry, I'll edit my comment to be more clear. It is illegal for school libraries to stock it, even if they (teachers, the district, the parents, etc.) want it to be carried.
As a reminder for readers, the title of the article contains "in U.S. schools". It is probably a safe assumption to use that context for the comments in this thread.
In that case it would be better to say "banned from school libraries", because they are not banned in general.
We're talking about an article titled "The Most Banned Books _in U.S. Schools_", I thought the "in U.S. schools" part provided the context, but I suppose not.
> banned from school libraries
So, banned then?
"The most banned books in America and here's where you can purchase them using our affiliate links".
banned != illegal
This list is very obviously politically motivated. None of these are banned. I can find them trivially on Amazon. My benchmark for "ban" would be a black out from common resellers.
There are common themes among all of them. All of them, your average parent, would rather their children not be exposed to in school. This list is more like "what should/shouldn't be acceptable for kids and teens". This is hardly a ban. It's at best parental control. But selling it as a ban is key to outrage culture and delivering their opinions about the current administration. Nothing is stopping a parent from purchasing these books for their child. Nothing is stopping them from finding them as a PDF, or at a local or online reseller. Pretending this is "taboo" information is an extremely poor attempt to hide political bikeshedding.
How does a “book ban” in a school work? The school is presumably only going to have a limited set of books. If I wanted to ban a book I’d just make it seem like a resource reorganization. “Oh we’re just focusing more on educational content around mathematics. These trans books will come around in a later reorg” and so on.
Is it like if you bring the book to school you’ll be sent home or something?
Here's how it works in idaho [1]
Most schools (at least in Idaho) have libraries attached to the school.
[1] https://www.acluidaho.org/app/uploads/2024/05/final_2024_05_...
Thank you. That's actually quite helpful. So it affects book selection at the library but actual ownership and bringing the book to school are unaffected. I understand why the opponents of these 'bans' call them that, but it's funny that the proponents do as well. One would imagine their goals better served through deception.
My high school would pull the book from the shelf but make it still available by request. Before the start of the next school year, it would be placed back on the shelf. Typically, whoever complained the previous year would have moved on to other things by then.
Reminder: a "book ban" is simply when a there is book that is acclaimed by the establishment, available in book stores across America, on the shelves of thousands of school libraries, but somewhere, some school board, or parent group does not want it in their curriculum or a tax-payer funded library. A "book ban" is parents and taxpayers overriding curation the decisions of government librarians.
It is simply a Russell conjugation: librarians curate books; parents and school boards ban books.
Personally, I don't trust librarians or school boards, and I put a lot of work into curating reading material for my own children. Many of the books I value are out-of-print, or unavailable in any public library, whereas almost all these so-called "banned books" are available in most public libraries. So yeah, these lists get a giant eye-roll from me.
I hate the current trend in histrionic social media. A ‘banned book’ is one that you are not allowed to own by the State. You face fines, detention, interrogation, prison, torture, execution. Examples are 1984, The Satanic Verses. Countries that maintain book bans are Iran, China, Russia, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan.
Your school not stocking books you want is not a ban. It’s the prerogative of the institution to choose how it shapes minds. It cannot avoid taking on some angle, since any incomplete collection is an editorial choice.
>A ‘banned book’ is one that you are not allowed to own by the State.
>Your school not stocking books you want is not a ban. It’s the prerogative of the institution to choose how it shapes minds.
At least some of these books are banned from schools by state-level law, not because the school district chose to not stock it.
Which books and which law? Aren't there other books that are banned for legitimate reasons like hate speech and racial hate that aren't included here?
>Which books and which law?
The one I was referring to:
https://www.sltrib.com/news/education/2024/08/02/utah-book-b...
"The law, which went into effect July 1, requires that a book be removed from all public schools in the state if at least three school districts (or at least two school districts and five charter schools) determine it amounts to “objective sensitive material”"
It seems like there may be more similar laws, per sibling comment.
>Aren't there other books that are banned for legitimate reasons like hate speech and racial hate that aren't included here?
I don't know, and I'm not sure how it is related to my comment. I did not create the list in the article and I don't maintain any other list of banned books.
This says it's a removal from the library, not a ban. You can have it with you, but it won't be available in the school library.
Would you want your kids reading Mein Kampf or The Passing of the Great Race? I wouldn't.
>You can have it with you, but it won't be available in the school library.
No, they are "prohibited in the school setting". You cannot bring it with you.
Florida bill 1069 allows parents to challenge the inclusion of books in the library, but only explicitly identifies books related to sexual preferences/conduct/etc.
https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2023/1069/BillText/er/...
The bill is all about pronouns, heterosexuality, abstinence, and getting books out of libraries on those grounds.
Inclusion != ban.
A ban would be you'd get in trouble for having the book in your possession, which isn't the case here.
Parents can sue the schools for retaining books they've challenged.
This is not a case of a school or librarian choosing books. This is a case of some external party forcing them to remove books.
Can you back this up with a source?
https://www.metroweekly.com/2024/06/an-idaho-library-goes-ad...
This isn't a school?
That's true. I provided you with a link to the text to the Florida bill that does impact school libraries in another thread.
The FAQ from that same site?
https://pen.org/book-bans/book-bans-frequently-asked-questio...
Not exactly a ban, as per their own source.
That link answered the question you asked, I’ll presume you are just being argumentative, and starting to border sea lioning.
The state is not an "external party" to a school. Schools are run by the state; they are not sovereign or independent entities empowered to make their own decisions.
Why are elected officials and parents "external parties" to the education of their children, while librarians are.. "internal"? What gives one, but not the other, the moral authority to decide what kind of education to give children (compelled by law to attend public school)?
Librarians actually read the books and are experts in the curation of the books. It is not actually about moral authority it is about expertise.
Special accommodations are made for students. Parents can ask for their child not to participate in activities they deem inappropriate. I see this happen all of the time during Halloween events. It would be nice if Christian conservatives would do the same.
> It is not actually about moral authority it is about expertise.
I sure am glad that there is an Objectively Correct set of books children should be exposed to, unaffected by issues of identity, politics, or morality, and it's just a matter of applying dispassionate expertise to discover it.
And of course, that this is what librarians are doing, and not letting their personal beliefs interfere.
It sounds like you are trying to say there is no such thing as expertise. These people have degrees in education and/or library science. Why bother going to university to learn anything then?
No, I am saying there is no such objectively correct set of books. Hiding behind "expertise" doesn't make educational decisions less political. Children can be indoctrinated more, or less, "expertly".
But then everyone knows this, and I don't for a second believe you or anyone else thinks school librarians make decisions entirely based on universal (i.e. not specific to any country, ethnic group, or political persuasion) dispassionate principles. You're only pretending to to win an argument, then you'll go right back to believing the opposite, and call for libraries to be "decolonized" [1].
I guess we're lucky libraries are expert and objective now, unlike how they were 3 years ago when they were biased and needed decolonizing. Except the ones that haven't decolonized yet, of course. Those librarians' expertise and judgment can still be questioned.
[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/narrative-expansion...
There is a difference between a professional academic librarians managing a collection and political activists suppressing societal critiques and marginalized identities.
The reference you posted is about collection management at libraries London School of Economics in England. England has different history with respect to colonization than the US. A sordid history in-fact. We are also talking books for adults not children under 18.
The US itself is was decolonization project. I hope you know that colonialism is rarely judged a good thing in modern scholarship.
Librarians and schools have always been able to curate their collections as they see fit. The issue here is the state is now getting directly involved which has very little precedent since the Red Scare.
Librarians culling collections by any arbitrary criteria = good, fine. (We even have examples of all books prior to 2000 being mass deleted!)
Parents (customers) lobbying school administrators about what should be in the school library = bad, evil.
Oh I see now. You are describing the ongoing laws which restrict minors from viewing certain content. You are calling this ‘book banning’.
Yeah, no.
A simple Google search would provide the answer you (aren't) seeking: https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/state-laws-on-book-b...
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I thought the countries you listed as maintaining book bans was a little short, given that basically every Western/First World/Global North country has previously banned or continues to ban books. For instance, Belgium, Finland, France, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, South Korea, and the United States have all banned the sale and publication of books within recent memory, with restrictions on the importation of books and potential detention and fines for people importing them, and there may have been legal challenges made to the authors and publishers of books.
The definition you gave for banning books does narrow it down a bit though. Restriction on the publication, sale, or importation isn't a ban, but possession is. Ah. I guess a book is only banned if you face legal consequences for owning it after purchase during the very limited window that it may appear on bookshelves. In that case, I can't say for certain that Australia, Canada, Germany, and New Zealand bans books, but I can say that I would not want to be in possession of certain types of books in these countries. The definition of 'banned books' gets a little murky here though, is the inevitable police detention and interrogation due to the possession of the books themselves or rather obscenity/hate speech/Nazism/terrorism/drug laws? Does it count if the detention and interrogation occurs after an unrelated search of your property? Is a book only banned if it is confiscated from your possession? Does it count if you win your court case?
Which leaves the only Western nations that fit such a definition as being Austria and the United Kingdom, which do objectively criminalise the possession of banned books.
What should we call it when you may know of a specific book but be unable to access it through any path available to you?
Banned makes sense to me as shorthand though sure it's not quite exactly accurate. Suggest me an alternative?
EDIT: This was a sincere and I thought pretty neutral question but I have clearly touched a nerve with this. Everyone seems to be having a great time.
Non-stocked by schools? That's literally what is happening.
Prevented to be stocked? Library removed?
What should we call it when you can legally acquire the book, read and share it with other people with no concern from the law or authorities whatsoever? Do you think the correct word for this is "banned"?
> What should we call it when you may know of a specific book but be unable to access it through any path available to you?
"Unavailable" ?
We have, broadly speaking, two groups deciding which books to make available to children using taxpayer money - the voters/parents/elected officials, and unelected librarians. If one of those groups decides to withhold a book from schoolchildren, it's fine and not a ban. But if another does the same, then it's a ban.
Or am I completely wrong, and Jared Taylor's "White Identity" is available in every school library, explaining its absence from "banned" book lists?
You are wilfully wrong.
So Jared Taylor's "White Identity" is available in most school libraries?
What does "ban" mean in this context? Like schools bought the book and it was removed, or it was on a "we won't approve this PO" list?
At first glance this is a useless list
https://pen.org/book-bans/book-bans-frequently-asked-questio...
We donnt have a list of banned books in France, or any discussion about that.
I now wonder whether this is great (freedom and so on) or terrible (manipulation and so on)
France bans hijabs in schools, so there's certainly more work left across the pond...