Time-Wasting, Truth-Wasting Exercises

Samuel Cohen’s anthology on book banning diagnoses a recent swell in censorship that’s problematic for more reasons than you’d think.

By John Downes-AngusMarch 9, 2026

• Education

• Politics

ON A CITYWIDE Zoom call with organizers in the United Federation of Teachers (the New York City teachers’ union), a chapter leader shared an organizing success story from her middle school. Her colleagues wanted to teach Lois Lowry’s The Giver (1993) to their seventh graders. The book is about a boy named Jonas who is chosen to inherit the pain, joy, and color of others, these memories kept from his society for the sake of maintaining stability. When realizing the injustice of this situation, Jonas saves them from their ignorance by returning the memories to them. It is a kid-friendly send-up of fascism, and the principal refused to allow teachers to teach Lowry’s book.

Apparently, this book has been banned in the past because of its political commentary, its violence, its occasional sexual references, and its depiction of euthanasia. The principal took issue with none of these things. Instead, she objected to the fact that it is a book. The school had adopted a reading curriculum—HMH’s Into Reading—that excluded books in favor of test-aligned excerpts, so the principal argued that teachers could not teach any books at all. In past years, students had loved The Giver. And the teachers wanted to give the kids the experience of reading a novel like Lowry’s, so the chapter leader spearheaded collective action: they wore “Freedom to Read” shirts and other shirts associated with book bans, raised the issue up to the superintendent—and ultimately won. The kids read the book and loved it.

I do not think this is what people think of when they think about book banning in the United States. But given the imperiled state of books and reading today, a more inclusive definition is desperately needed. People inclined to learn more about book banning should read University of Missouri English professor Samuel Cohen’s new edited volume Banning Books in America: Not a How-To. Cohen has put together a range of texts—essays, for the most part, but also an interview, an excerpt from a novel, and Cohen’s own syllabus for his course on banned books—that capture the titular subject in its many forms.

This volume is, as Cohen writes, a “book about America.” It is, more specifically, a book about something like what Richard Hofstadter called, in his sprawling 1963 study Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, a set of American “attitudes that […] gravely inhibit or impoverish intellectual and cultural life.” Hofstadter’s argument addressed the controversies of his time: he took aim at McCarthyist repression, religious fundamentalism, and anti-intellectual forms of American schooling, particularly the “life adjustment” curriculum that sought to ready students for the demands of the workforce.

Ours is a different time, but, in some ways, only marginally so. As Dominique J. Baker has pointed out, recent crackdowns on free inquiry and speech on college campuses echo the ugliest impulses of that era. Eric Hayot and Matt Seybold have argued, in a similar vein, that what began as a crisis of the humanities, one caused in part by university administrators’ capitulations to a wealthy few, now encompasses universities in their entirety, and we witness plenty of efforts to reduce schooling to workforce preparation.

All of these forces of anti-intellectualism in American life—prejudices masquerading as cultural stewardship, organized attacks on free speech sanctioned by state and federal officials, schools that subordinate the cultivation of intellects to the demands of industry, and coordinated distortions of the American mind that serve the interests of a wealthy few—are unpacked in Cohen’s volume. Those of us who care about what books can do should consider what these contributors have to tell us. We have arrived at a situation in which the central activity of free, humanistic inquiry—the unrestrained reading of books—now requires clear, affirmative defenses from those who believe it’s a practice worth defending.

¤

This volume is organized into three sections: writers on book banning, arguments about book banning, and teachers on book banning. In the first section, novelists share how censorship impacts their work. In the second section, diverse voices—academics, organizers, and administrators—present arguments situating book bans in their historical, legal, and institutional contexts. Finally, in the third section, we hear from professors and teachers about how efforts to ban books have impacted American classrooms. By including so many perspectives, the volume gives a vitally expansive sense of what, exactly, we mean when we say “book ban.”

A popular right-wing argument is that there are, in fact, no book bans in the United States: nobody’s banning anything, they are simply trying to curate appropriate curricula or exercise their parental rights. As Cohen himself says in his introduction, laws banning a book entirely out of existence—rather than, say, from a school library—would constitute a flagrant First Amendment violation. But the phrase “book ban” flags how these situations always include an imbalance of power, one in which a narrow-minded few control how and what people read, think, and imagine.

Emily Harris, who serves on the board of Annie’s Foundation—a grassroots organization committed to keeping books on school and library shelves—writes of her own experiences fighting back against the impact of Iowa’s SF496. This law requires, as she puts it, that “any book containing a depiction or description of a sex act must be removed—no matter the context, and regardless of its literary, historical, or educational value.” Schools have removed everything from William Faulkner’s novels to books designed to help victims of sexual violence. These laws often have the support of national right-wing organizations like Moms for Liberty. In fact, Annie’s Foundation is named for the memory of Ann Lohry-Smith, who began her education organizing work fighting against a challenge filed by a Moms for Liberty member who didn’t have children in the school district. Harris argues that calling this sort of work anything other than “banning” is an attempt to dodge moral and legal responsibility. “The goal,” she writes, “is erasure.”

Emily Drabinski, who served as the first openly LGBTQIA+ president of the American Library Association, provides a moving account of what these prejudicial bans do to readers and defenders of free speech. She describes becoming president of the ALA at a time when the United States had reached unprecedented numbers of book challenges. Of that experience, she writes that “attacks on books about who we are quickly became attacks on who I am.” She was followed, harassed; in one case, a woman attended Drabinski’s public events and began recording her so that she could share videos with hateful commentary to an online audience. Three states prohibited libraries from participating in anything related to the ALA because of her appointment. Other librarians faced similar forms of harassment. All of this took place because some Americans fear librarians’ efforts to give young readers the potentially lifesaving opportunity, as Drabinski puts it, to “read a book that helps us engage in that private negotiation of the self that we call coming out.”

The contributors call readers’ attention to other forms of banning and censorship, though—ones less obviously repugnant and hateful, but pernicious nonetheless. In his contribution, Brian K. Goodman, who studies Cold War literary history, looks at censorship on both sides of the Iron Curtain, including a fascinating history of literary avant-gardism in Soviet-aligned Czechoslovakia. Ultimately, he considers how Americans misappropriated Cold War era discourses in the 1990s and 2000s—including neoconservatives arguing that “political correctness” enforced self-censorship—to parse different forms of censorship today. Instead of framing book bans as simplistic binaries between authoritarianism and freedom, he argues that “we should imagine our own twenty-first century censors in cardigans and reading glasses rather than in red hats and jackboots.” The porous boundary between authoritarianism and more benign forms of cultural stewardship has led us to our current state, one in which consolidated power has created new kinds of institutional censorship that can be hard to label or discern.

Some contributors to this volume attempt to name those new forms of institutional censorship. Lydia Millet takes aim at some of the censorious impulses of the corporate publishing industry. She criticizes what she calls occasional “paternalistic screening” in publishing, including things like sensitivity readers. Surely the impact of corporate consolidation and private equity in book publishing exerts a more profound influence on writers’ freedom to express themselves than sensitivity readers do, but Millet neglects to address those issues specifically. She emphasizes, though, that book awards in the industry “tend to promote middlebrow forms of storytelling that rely on familiar idioms and safe signposts of high-mindedness.” Millet acknowledges how awards accomplish the important work of promoting some good books in a moment of cultural decline, but her essay cautions against the social and aesthetic consequences of “campaigns to quash speech,” which she says are “time-wasting, truth-wasting exercises in the denial of social reality.”

Annie Abrams, a New York City teacher, locates book banning in the politically and socially progressive city in which we both teach—and in the broader, neoliberal policy context in which American teachers now work. She explains the impact of the adoption of the Common Core State Standards on how American students learn to read. The implementation of these standards had, Abrams writes, two key consequences: they beckoned an era of reading instruction that privileges test scores over all else while, at the same time, enabling top-down, antidemocratic approaches to curriculum development and placing a centralized state authority in charge. To illustrate the consequences of this, she refers to what has happened in Houston, where a state takeover led by Superintendent Mike Miles has resulted in a situation in which all attention and resources have been dedicated to improving math and English scores. These officials fired librarians, repurposing libraries as places for disciplining students, and used AI to generate readings for students who tested out of the program.

Texas is not alone in this: in New York City, we see books disappearing because of the changes these policies created. As Abrams points out, the New York State test that all students need to take to graduate, the Regents Examination in English Language Arts, changed over a decade ago to align with the Common Core. The updates accommodated the standards’ call for assessing students’ ability to write argument essays, read “informational texts,” and do the sort of close reading associated with the New Critics. The argument essay, which asks students to read four articles and then take positions on issues like the merits of vertical farms and the presence of shark nets on coastal beaches, replaced an essay that required students to respond to a debatable claim with reference to two works of literature (novels or plays) they read in class. The year before that test, I taught five books; the year it was changed, I taught one.

I have, at this point, brought books back to the center of my class, but it’s difficult to balance reading and discussing books with all the other skills we’re expected to teach. Other educators and families are, thankfully, resisting this, including those teachers who fought to teach The Giver. Recent coverage of this issue in The New York Times suggests that it has reached the attention of people outside the classroom. And studies like that of Jonna Perrillo and Andrew Newman, arguing that an unprecedented focus on standardized testing and credentialing has killed the joy of reading for students, lay the groundwork for these grassroots movements.

Ultimately, Cohen’s volume helps us all by expanding what we mean when we say “book banning.” By including contributions that broaden the conversation about book bans to encompass everything from the hateful targeting of marginalized identities to neoliberal education policy, Cohen reveals this struggle as an old American conflict between those who want to think freely and those who want to tell others what and how to think. He clarifies common enemies and allies. These bans—all expressions of American anti-intellectualism—all begin with the assumption that ordinary people (teachers, parents, readers) don’t know what’s good for them.

¤

What is to be done? First, people who could influence the place of books in public life—teachers, policymakers, administrators, writers, editors, parents, scholars—should speak up about the virtues of reading them, even if those virtues seem self-evident. Cohen describes books as “the oldest and best place where opinions and arguments and impressions and whole worlds are captured and recorded.” He’s right, and those of us who take that belief seriously need to act like it: our defense should be reflected in everything from the book publishers we support to the education policies we get behind. We cannot afford to decenter books in favor of other reading media, as the National Council of Teachers of English suggests (surely, curriculum writers were delighted to see this suggestion, given that it feeds directly into their publishing model).

We cannot double down on misguided education policies that endorse reading instruction solely focused on standardized test scores; this kind of reading will never make kids love books. We cannot, as Democrats continue to do, coordinate schooling with industry demands at the expense of humanistic learning—this partnership cemented the development of the Common Core, and it is what has historically animated most of Democrats’ education policy endeavors. Accommodating the business community in schools has reached parodic heights from powerful progressives: recently, even the American Federation of Teachers started shoveling union members’ dues to Microsoft and OpenAI, apparently to help American kids keep up with the changing world.

Conservatives have taken advantage of Democrats’ abdication of books and embrace of industry; as Jennifer C. Berkshire wrote recently, Democrats are now losing to the Right in claiming a more humane vision for what could happen in schools. They have not, she points out, articulated a clear purpose for schools beyond test preparation and workforce readiness. The Right has, endorsing their own politicized version of Classical Schools backed by a deep cadre of right-wing funders. The Left has a responsibility to come up with a response to this circumscribed form of humanism, one that barely conceals its roots in Christian nationalism. The liberal arts tradition, rooted in reading books that have historically been challenged, banned, and burned, belongs to all of us, not to a privatized sector of American schooling that plainly disdains radical individualism, diversity, and the division between church and state.

At the end of Drabinski’s essay, she provides an account of a trip she took across the country to visit and document American librarians doing the work of keeping books on their shelves. “Everywhere I went,” she writes, “I met people fighting together for a world where all of us can be free.” The “us” here is particular: she’s referring to the marginalized voices most often attacked by book banners. But it’s also universal. If we want to keep American minds free from harmful moral prejudices, narrow and bland aesthetic standards, the invasion of tech oligarchs and profit-driven curricula in our classrooms—from everything, in other words, that book banners of all forms promote—then we must commit, together, to defending books and their readers.

Against a bookless world, we should cultivate readers like Tai Caputo, the Iowa student whose interview with Jane Smiley is reprinted in Cohen’s volume. In it, Caputo courageously calls out the people who wanted to keep books off students’ shelves, and she asks Smiley for tips on how to complete her independent project that included reading 10 novels in English and French—some of which she couldn’t find in her school’s library. Smiley told her to find used books online and do whatever she could to keep that project going, to enjoy the thrill of this independent reading project precisely in spite of the fact that her school’s library thought that books like Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1991) and even Wuthering Heights (1847) were too risqué to shelve.

This is what kids like that need to hear about reading, over and over: We think what you’re doing is important. Keep going.