Banned Books, Critical Thinking, and the Education Fight
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This week on This Ain’t It, we’re leaning into Banned Books Week, a tradition that’s been around since 1982 when the American Library Association started pushing back against censorship. Every October, it’s a reminder that challenges to books in schools and libraries aren’t just history—they’re happening right now.
Before diving in, we kicked things off with a little Bible study. Proverbs 18:15 says: “An intelligent mind acquires knowledge, and the ear of the wise seeks knowledge.” That felt like the right starting place for a conversation about books, learning, and why it all matters.
The Rise of Book Bans
Melissa shared a recent story from Book Riot about a Texas school district using AI to flag and ban books—including To Kill a Mockingbird. The list wasn’t just the usual suspects like Gender Queer or graphic novels dealing with tough themes. It also included John Corey Whaley’s Highly Illogical Behavior—a YA novel about agoraphobia, friendship, and identity—and even The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.
Why would a firsthand account of slavery, written by Douglass himself, be considered inappropriate for students? As we talked through it, it became clear that a lot of these bans aren’t about protecting kids—they’re about controlling which stories get told.
What Education Is Really For
That took us into the bigger question: What’s the purpose of education? Is it about teaching kids to think for themselves, or is it about making sure they only repeat what adults already believe?
We’ve seen legislators push bills banning anything “divisive”—a word so vague it can mean almost anything. We’ve seen efforts to put the Ten Commandments in classrooms. And we’ve seen entire organizations, from the United Daughters of the Confederacy in the early 1900s to groups today, try to rewrite history to protect their version of the truth.
For us, the heart of education has to be critical thinking: helping kids question, research, and engage with perspectives beyond their own. Not to churn out replicas of their parents, but to raise adults who can think independently and navigate the world with empathy.
The Role of History and Critical Thinking
We shared examples of misleading statistics and half-truths floating around social media—whether it’s subway crime rates, vaccine misinformation, or “patriotic” curriculums that erase uncomfortable parts of America’s past. Without critical thinking, it’s easy to get swept up by propaganda dressed up as truth.
That’s why voices like James Baldwin and W.E.B. Du Bois matter so much. Baldwin once said, “You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” Books connect us, reminding us that suffering, hope, and resilience are part of the human story.
And as Du Bois warned, when we sugarcoat history with “palatable myths,” we lose the chance to learn from the past—and risk repeating it.
Finding Meaning in Hardship
We closed with some personal reflections—on church, on family, on what it means to raise kids in a world where truth is contested. Melissa shared how even on a recent work trip to the Dominican Republic, a local guide reminded her of the same truth Viktor Frankl once wrote: growth comes through hardship, and progress is real even when it’s messy.
At the end of the day, banned books aren’t just about what’s on the shelves. They’re about who gets to decide what counts as knowledge, and whether we’re raising kids to think—or just to obey.