The belief in the power of books and book banning

An interesting essay that comes closer than most in seeking to understand complex trade-offs. From What Kind of Town Bans Books? by Annie Julia Wyman. Wyman is discussing the paradox that the community in which she grew to adulthood and which provided the intellectual Petrie dish that ultimately led to her teaching at Harvard, is also one that is disposed to banning books.

Last week, during the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week, I found out that a group of parents had recently pressured the public school I attended, in Texas, into “suspending” not just one but seven different books from assigned reading lists. The plain fact of the suspension wasn’t surprising to me. Highland Park High School, situated in perhaps the best school district in the state, serves a conservative community in two small towns that thrive on football and prayer and whose combined population of thirty-one thousand is ninety-one per cent white. During my time there, we had a chaplain for every sports team, creationists on the teaching staff, and a mandatory daily recitation of the Texas State Pledge. But people who live in places like my home town are not necessarily ignorant. People who ban books do sometimes read them. The towns my high school serves, Highland Park and University Park (collectively known as the Park Cities) are the two most educated municipalities in Texas. The Dallas Morning News reported that more than a hundred concerned residents attended a school board meeting to debate the suspension, many armed with “books flagged with sticky notes” from which they argued.

The paradox is that bright people and people on the left as often as not are the book banners.

I think the underlying motif force is admirable - a rock solid belief in the importance of books and a belief in their capacity to positively or negatively shape a life. It is also a testament to exactly what you would want - parents intimately involved in fostering a well-rounded child who is hale in body and mind. And for everyone who wants to ban Harry Potter because of a putative connection to witchcraft, there is someone wanting to ban Little House on the Prairie for its putative connection to disrespecting Native Americans. While their target of concern may be selected on different grounds, they share a conviction of the importance of books.

The irony Wyman is pointing out is that there is no incompatibility between a love of books, a love of children, a commitment to good life outcomes for those near and dear to us, a conviction about the importance of basic human rights including the freedom of speech, and the inclination to shelter children from books not deemed appropriate. For those on the left, there is the double irony that robust, productive, prosperous, communities are evidence that the belief in the importance of good books in a good life is a non-partisan belief.

Everyone wants to control the environment in which their children come of age. It is of course an unattainable dream. All you can do is influence that environment. The difference is that some people believe the capacity to control the environment should be vested in an elect while others believe it should be dispersed among all citizens.

There is an interesting corollary question - is there any sort of correlation between positive life outcomes and the type of books different groups wish to control? Wyman is indicating that the residents of Park Cities community are highly educated and are highly accomplished/productive and want to control books about sex, violence and victimhood. Wyman is testifying that this approach leads to good outcomes for many of those children.

What about those communities in which sex, violence and victimhood books are celebrated and traditional books are suppressed - is that approach associated with positive outcomes? Charles Murray's Coming Apart suggests not but I haven't ever seen a robust research on the differences in book affinity and life outcomes.

Wyman finishes with an acknowledgement that the community of which she is so embarrassed was also one that had such a passionate belief in the power of books that it would go to extreme lengths to ensure that there were the right books for her to read and that that passionate belief in books was what contributed to her own remarkable success in life.

My own story provides some evidence of how books can expand the horizons of a kid growing up somewhere like Highland Park. As a young woman with desires for things that I’d read about but couldn’t find in my home town—including what felt like non-negotiable forms of social and economic justice—I stayed away from the Park Cities during and after college. I refrained, too, from talking about where I came from, because it embarrassed me. I could see only that I came from homogeneity; I was terrified I would be rejected from the new life I’d stumbled into, a life that was richer and more complex. But I should have been more honest. I never would have known to be embarrassed had I not gone to world-class public schools where I read whatever I wanted. Books were there, and they had taught me to value difference.