Zooming Out
What are book bans and censorship really about?
This piece is made available through the support of the ProTruth South Carolina coalition. A full version is available on their website by clicking here.
In 2026, children and young adults are facing some stressors and threats that come once in a generation, and some which have never existed before.
AI-generated misinformation and disinformation. Social media algorithms that are associated with significant mental health challenges. Significant instability in the housing, jobs, and healthcare markets.
And years of instability caused not only by the COVID-19 pandemic, itself, but by the ensuing political bickering over masks, books, and “ideology” in schools, with the accompanying reactionary politics, threats against educators, and intensifying divisiveness.
It seems extremely unlikely that the average person, in a moment of sober reflection, really believes that books and materials selected by school librarians and teachers rank anywhere near top of the list when it comes to these current threats against children. So what is really going on here?
For one thing, the fixation on the “problem” of physically-available books ignores that children, like adults, get the vast majority of their content— good and bad— from online sources, whether they’re at home or at school.
According to NPR, by 2019 over half of children in America already owned a smartphone by age 11. The percentage in 2026 is probably considerably higher. Even with parental controls, in my experience children and young adults are very good at using VPNs (virtual private networks) and other work-arounds (not to mention other kids’ phones) to access anything the internet has to offer.
Obviously, this includes virtually any book ever written, whether from legal resources like public libraries, public domain resources like Project Gutenberg, or freely-available pirated PDFs.
But most kids are probably not illicitly accessing books online. As a former high school English teacher, I would venture to say that’s actually wishful thinking.
I would love to believe that most young people are desperately seeking out things to read.
But according to PEW research, “The shares of American 9- and 13-year-olds who say they read for fun on an almost daily basis have dropped from nearly a decade ago and are at the lowest levels since at least the mid-1980s, according to a survey conducted in late 2019 and early 2020 by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)”.
A full version is available on the ProTruth South Carolina website by clicking here.
