There’s been a recent uptick in stories about the banning of books at libraries and schools, particularly in the US but also in the UK, where the Guardian recently reported that one third of librarians have been asked to censor or remove books by members of the public. In both contexts, these controversies tend to centre on books that deal with race, gender, sexuality, and imperialism, and in some cases these controversies include threats of violence against schools and libraries, and the professionals who work in them. In order to understand this phenomenon, how dangerous it is, how it spreads, and how to combat it, it’s worth examining the history of public schools and libraries.
Prior to the mid-19th century, nearly all schools and libraries across Europe and North America were organised by religious institutions, with a smaller number of secular private institutions. These schools and libraries were generally not intended, and did not have the capacity, to serve more than a relatively small percentage of children and adults, and were accessible almost exclusively to well-off families. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, governments on both continents adopted various schemes to make education available to boys, and later girls, regardless of their social class or economic status. These schemes were concurrent with, and supported by, an expansion of public libraries. The establishment of widespread, publicly-funded institutions of learning transformed education into a venue for enacting social policy, and therefore a subject of political struggle.
At the extreme end of political struggle, we see culture war tactics including moral panic, threats of violence, and attempts to disrupt government’s ability to enact policy and provide social services. The current calls for book bans are targeted precisely at books that engage with topics that are the subjects of moral panic among “anti-woke” political activists: LGBTQ+ and particularly trans rights have been at the centre of the QAnon conspiracy theory and a target of Christian Nationalism for years; acknowledgement of racism has led to a backlash against Critical Race Theory, a previously obscure methodology in legal scholarship and sociology; recognising the social and economic impacts of settler colonialism on indigenous people has generated fierce, nationalistic opposition. In the context of moral panic, trans and non-binary people and those who support them are accused of being paedophiles, anti-racists are described as irrationally self-loathing, and any criticism of the “great men of our history” is deemed unpatriotic.
The US is a major exporter of culture, including movies, television, and music, but also conspiracies, grifts, and moral panics. The QAnon conspiracy theory refers to a US security clearance and centres on the former US President, yet it has followers and proponents across Europe, the Americas and beyond. Critical Race Theory emerged as a methodology for analysing the US legal system, but it is now decried in countries where it has never been taken up. Direct attempts to ban books by members of the public, including through threats and intimidation, have been part of the fabric of US life since at least the 1980s, and are now being adopted as a tactic by extremist activists in the UK and elsewhere.
In one sense, the US is more vulnerable to politically-motivated attacks on educational institutions. Unlike the UK, the US government provides no guidance whatsoever on curriculum or policy for schools and libraries, and local jurisdictions (states and counties) seldom mandate anything more than relatively broad standards. Instead, our schools and libraries are almost entirely governed by boards of local citizens. This provides a localised pressure point for political activists to assault, by disrupting the meetings of those boards and threatening and intimidating their members, and the activists who engage in these activities are well organised and funded by networks of political operations, allowing them to coordinate and support attacks on school and library boards outside of their own communities.
Yet as the rise in direct book challenges in the UK demonstrates, extremist activists are adapting the same tactics that emerged in the US, and regular readers of The Skeptic will need no reminder that the far right in the UK is also well organised, and capable of turning out activists to engage in moral panic on a range of topics. While the UK’s centralised system of education may have insulated schools from direct attacks by members of the extremist activist public, libraries are already experiencing such attacks. Worryingly, the Conservative government has recently made moves that position schools as a culture wars battleground, including adopting the US-based framing of “anti-woke” politics, and challenging how relationships and sex education are taught in schools, both moves which tie into ongoing moral panics, and which may be precursors to targeted harassment of racial minorities and LGBTQ+ students, educators, and members of the public.
There is, however, some cause for optimism by those who oppose moral panic and far-right extremism. The educational systems in the UK are broadly supported by the public, with a recent YouGov poll finding 70% of parents feel that schools are doing a good job at educating students. When parents and communities have such a level of trust in their schools, they tend to stand up and defend them when they come under attack. Indeed, this is what has happened in many communities in the US, as local grassroots groups mostly defeated far-right candidates for school boards in recent elections, despite the strong funding provided to extremist candidates by outside political groups. And some polling has shown that these tactics are backfiring, by raising interest in reading controversial books among young people, and galvanising centre-left voters into political action.
Education is a political battleground, whether we want it to be or not. Perhaps it is appropriate that they should be, given the roles of public funding and social policy in public educational institutions. Currently, the battleground is being defined by extremists who are using these institutions to advance xenophobic and anti-LGBTQ agendas, and using the tactics of moral panic, including public outrage, intimidation, and threats. The good news is that it hasn’t taken much to defeat extremism on this particular battleground, because our society continues to value public education and its institutions. Extremist victories in this space have largely come as a result of surprise attacks, so please, don’t be surprised by these tactics, and be ready to stand up for your local schools and libraries.
