Info
The young people who will be entering college in the 2026-2027 school year were in eighth grade when book banning began its latest national increase. For young people in some states, including Florida, Texas, Utah, and others, this means that they’ve never had access to a wide swath of books on topics like racism, gender, puberty, or sexuality that their peers in other states have.
These young people have grown up under a regime that has taught them the only thing that matters when it comes to reading books are cherry-picked passages and counting profanity, as modeled by partisan parental rights groups. These young people have had varying levels of access to their schools or public libraries, as well as to digital tools, including informational databases. While students from well-off backgrounds in states where book censorship is rampant will be fine (that’s by design), many will begin their higher education at a significant disadvantage compared to peers from states where literary access has been better protected.
Simultaneous to these bans–and at times with no acknowledgement of them whatsoever–there’s been a lot of time devoted to how today’s kids can’t or don’t read whole books in the classroom anymore. There’s also been regular messaging in far-right social media spaces about the decline in standardized test scores, especially in reading. The first is real; it’s due in part to educational reform and requirements and in part because it’s just safer for educators to excerpt materials. Besides, that’s how many of the parents operate, and their focus on simply excerpting parts from the whole to get what they want sets a precedent. The loudest and pushiest adults today model poor literacy, and in places where they can’t hack it on their own, they rely on AI to fill in the gaps.
The claim that reading test scores have declined is not true. It’s a manufactured and convenient panic based on decontextualized interpretation to advance further the agenda of a group eager to continue erasing so-called “progressive” ideas in public spaces. The same adults who pull out passages from books they don’t like to get them banned and put the pressure on educators to choose excerpts over complete novels bemoan poor test scores. But there’s no actual test-score problem. There’s a literacy problem, and those parroting the lines provided to them by partisan interests shine that light brightly.
Book censorship has been foundational to America. The first book banned in the colonized country was Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan. It riled the Puritan government for its depiction of Native people as human. This ran counter to what those in charge wanted their subjects to believe. Morton’s book was banned even before we had a First Amendment; following the First Amendment, America saw book bans come and go in waves every few decades. Uncle Tom’s Cabin made the United Daughters of the Confederacy mad, Ulysses made the postal censors mad, The Grapes of Wrath and Native Son and comics and children’s books about racial integration and even books about alcohol in public libraries during Prohibition saw themselves banned. Cities like Boston prided themselves on their long-running censorship efforts, all in an effort to “protect” citizens from what a small number of people decided were the morals and virtues espoused by all. Those beliefs centered on a particular vision and interpretation of Christianity.
All of this is context for a fascinating study from the 1970s about the impact of book bans on young people. That era saw a lot of book bans, as the country wrestled with defining “obscenity” via the federal court system. Before the Miller Test–the prevailing tool for determining what does or does not constitute “obscenity,” decided by the Supreme Court in 1973–the standard was the Roth Test (1957) and before that, the Hicklin Test (adapted in Britain in 1868 and the U.S. in 1896). Among some of the books banned in this era?
In 1974, amidst complaints about pigs wearing police clothing in a fictional picture book and short stories that were “too negative,” a Purdue Opinion Panel that surveyed high school students in 10th through 12th grade showed students who were opposed to book censorship were better students than their peers who agreed with such censorship. The study was part of many done between the 1940s and 1980s that explored teen opinions on civic matters.
 |
Researchers asked 8,500 teenagers to share their opinions on book bans, while also presenting them with a vocabulary quiz. It shouldn’t be entirely surprising that teens who believe in the freedom to read are not only more likely to read, but they also do better on a subsequent vocabulary quiz. It’s almost as if reading begets reading, and that reading in turn begets greater preparedness and attentiveness in education.
Three out of four teenagers also believed that book censorship violated their First Amendment rights. Recall this was before widespread access to information about where and how book censorship was happening. This was a period before organizing could easily and quickly occur beyond the walls of one’s own school, and before knowledge of what was happening locally, let alone nationally, was as easy to access. Students couldn’t, say, notice that eight books were removed from a statewide reading ban and immediately alert the authors about the situation; they weren’t aware of students elsewhere in their states actively engaged in anti-censorship efforts and thus, able to collaborate on ensuring that they retained the right to read and access a diverse, inclusive, and representative curriculum.
Given the ways that civics education has shifted in the last 25 years–fewer states require it as part of the curriculum, and what that curriculum requires is not consistent–it’s hard to guess where and how today’s teenagers might view book censorship as it relates to their constitutional rights. Plenty of state governments tell young people flat out that they don’t have constitutional rights–see Florida’s insistence that the Ginsburg test is the prevailing means by which to determine literature’s appropriateness for minors. This is despite the 7-2 Supreme Court decision in the landmark case Tinker v. Des Moines, which states that students do not, in fact, shed their free speech or expression rights at the schoolhouse gate. It’s despite the decision in Island Trees v. Pico, which held that school boards couldn’t remove titles from the school library simply because they disliked the ideas within them.
This survey may have been conducted in 1974, but teens today still believe in the freedom to read. In 2023, First Book studied the impact of book bans on students via their educators. There are no surprises here. Students who have the freedom to choose what they read read more. In areas where book bans abound, students read less. It is a falsehood that banning books drives young people to pick them up. They read less, engage less with literacy activities, and, as a result, their own education suffers.
For all of the handwringing about declining test scores and for all of the reports on how young people have stopped reading novels, how and where can anyone be surprised that the conditions were invented and propagated by the very far-right conspiracy theorists who model poor literacy and actively engage in banning materials they don’t like? Young people who don’t read turn into adults who can’t read. The very adults who claim they “care about the kids” eschew research in favor of their agenda, promising a future that they themselves have invented as right now: declining test scores in reading because the kids aren’t reading. It is poor literacy begetting poor literacy begetting poor literacy.
As always, the kids not only understand this, but they also continue to be victims of it through no fault of their own. Their parents use them as props in a battle they invented, denying those young people autonomy and a robust education that would give them the tools to succeed in the real world.
Top line story this week is the same one as last week, with an update. For years, those working in the anti-book ban space have noted this isn’t about the books. It’s about silence and erasure of voices and perspectives that don’t uphold white supremacy. We’re seeing the gloves come completely off now. Bridget Ziegler, one of the original Moms for Liberty founders (and yes, the one embroiled in a sex scandal) and now chair of the Sarasota School Board, has made it clear that the district should collaborate with ICE. This week, they voted to collaborate with ICE and other law enforcement agencies. This is a direct call to harm marginalized young people and their families in Sarasota. It isn’t the books. It’s the people represented by those books that are deemed ban-worthy. Worth noting here that students protested the move, but as has become crystal clear, those impacted by cruel school policies don’t actually get their voices heard.