Banning Books In Schools

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Book bans have risen in prevalence in the past few years. With the pandemic in 2020, parents began to want more control over their child’s education. These bans have divided parents and students; one group supports the increased censure of literature, while the other petitions for freedom of literature. Book bans can prevent young children from seeing potentially harmful information, but they also allow some groups to push the envelope, banning books based on their beliefs rather than facts. Many of these books include LGBTQ+ topics, abuse, violence, and racism. The number of banned books in the U.S. is over 3,500 and has increased by over 2,500 in the 2020-21 school year alone. This raises some questions. For instance, to what extent should …show more content…

Schools can restrict inappropriate books and literature, but not to a point where the curriculum is drastically changed. These sources are in contradiction to what’s currently happening in the U.S. education system. Even with this precedent, there are many cases of books and whole classes being banned, even if it drastically changes the curriculum. Book bans in schools create a segregated education between liberal and conservative states. A possible solution to this could be the standardization of education across the nation, eliminating discrepancies in the material taught in schools. Book bans are prevalent in schools across the country. PEN America, a nonprofit organization that advocates for freedom of literature, published a detailed report on book bans. In this report, many topics surrounding book bans are argued, as PEN America’s beliefs sit in contradiction to the idea of banning literature in schools, which could cause bias. The increasing frequency of book bans not only negatively affects students’ ability to read freely, but also restricts their access to information useful for their future …show more content…

Conservative states would have a more idealized education, tailored to the parent’s relief systems, while Liberal states’ education would be more broad, encouraging more critical thinking. Some parents’ overbearingness in their child’s education could cause a rift between different education styles in the U.S. At a large scale, book bans have the potential to have serious consequences. Book bans aren’t proven to be effective on a large scale, in some cases even increasing the visibility of restricted literature. A possible solution to this could be restricting books on a student-by-student basis, not school-wide. Uttara Ananthakrishnan, Ananya San, and Michael D. Smith from Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College, a prestigious college for analytics education, present the results of a research study. In the article, it references a survey done that includes a data set of over 17,000 books, to find the effectiveness of book bans. Their findings indicated that “Banning a book in one state led to an 11% increase in circulation of the book in states of different political leanings that did not ban the book”

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