We are in the midst of an intellectual crisis. In just a few years, book banning in the U.S. has become routine. Classroom discussions of race, gender, and sexuality are forbidden in an increasing number of Republican-controlled states. New laws are allowing parents to sue their school districts for possessing books on “critical race theory” and “gender ideology”, which is often just right-wing code for discussions of race, and gender and sexuality, respectively.

These bans not only have dangerous ramifications for queer people, women, and people of color, but also for freedom of knowledge and freedom of speech. I'm not that interested in discussing the effects of these bans, since other people have discussed them far better than I ever could.

I'm more interested in the justifications for these bans. One argument we hear is simply that these books are “liberal indoctrination”. But embedded in this argument is the presupposition that parents have the right to control what their children learn — in simpler terms, “parents' rights”. This more salient question—who should decide what and how children learn—is what I want to investigate, and I believe that my answer, which will come later, resolves concerns of “liberal indoctrination”.

Setting the Stage

I feel that I have a responsibility to note that parents are not all alike on this issue. They're pretty much split half and half on whether the LGBTQ civil rights movement, or just sexual orientation and gender identity in general, should be taught in K-12 schools.^[1] And they're split right down party lines: Republican parents largely don't support the teaching of these subjects, while Democratic parents largely do. American adults are also split pretty evenly on whether books should be banned in principle, again largely along party lines. I should note that among the adults who have actually read the books in question, they are generally supported (Sanders), but, you know, people don't like reading books.

It's easy to dismiss book banning as a few local nutjobs finding their latest crusade. But the Washington Post analyzed over 1,000 challenges by parents and found that even though challenges were often from a few parents, they usually acted on behalf of large groups of parents.^[2] And although these groups usually come together through organic connections, they also receive support from conservative organizations like Moms for Liberty, backed by Republican Party infrastructure and promoted by right-wing media.^[3] We cannot pretend that book bans are the work of a tiny group of extremists, because they are dangerously widespread. The “extreme” is within the mainstream.

If we have any hope of stopping this increasingly powerful censorship movement, it has to be met with an even more powerful response. So let's examine how the Democratic Party has responded, shall we?

On May 19, 2023, Biden-appointed Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona tweeted, “Teachers know what is best for their kids because they are with them every day. We must trust teachers.”^[4] This tweet was predictably hit with major backlash from the right.

For many of the groups that are pushing it, the idea of “parents' rights” is a dog whistle. It's an ideological shield that the far right uses to take away rights from marginalized groups. The far right will drop their support of parents in a second when it serves their actual goal of harming these groups.

But even though “parents' rights” is used as a dog whistle, people do genuinely sympathize with it. It's easy to see why — although those complaints are often tainted with bigoted conspiracy theories, there is a legitimate argument here. Why shouldn't parents be able to have a say in how their children are taught? I mean, they are their children, after all.

Faults in the Current Counterargument

It's difficult to counter the “parents rights” argument with “teachers rights” because it forces a question of ownership. Who “owns” the children? You could argue that, during the school day, teachers own their students, but their students are only in school with the consent of parents. Whether this is the best way of doing things is debatable, but what's not debatable is that, in our current society, parents are given the near-exclusive authority to make decisions for their children. So persuading the public that teachers should have more of that authority, at least on what children should read, will be a battle against the status quo.

But I think the counter of “teachers rights” is a bit more problematic than just that. I mean, sometimes the things worth fighting for are difficult. So let's evaluate: is giving teachers more control the best way of doing things?

The Democratic argument, which comes in a few flavors, seems to be that teachers are more qualified to make these decisions.

One variation of this argument is a practical framing: teachers should decide what and how children learn because they are more knowledgeable about teaching than parents. I would say that this is probably a smart argument. Teachers have to train and educate themselves in teaching methods, pedagogy, and of course, the material they teach. Even if this training is “liberal indoctrination”, it doesn't follow that control should be taken from teachers; rather, their training would have to be reformed.

There's also an emotional framing to the argument: teachers are more qualified because they are the arbitrators of knowledge, the guardians of academia, selfless servants who have only the child's interests at heart! I would say that this is a weak argument. If we're comparing teachers to parents, are we really going to try to argue that teachers have their students' interests at heart more than parents? But even if we're considering teachers in a vacuum, let's be real with ourselves. Anyone who has recently gone to school is aware of how many bad teachers there are.

Some teachers are apathetic; they lack the desire to put effort into teaching. They ignore their students, give them endless busywork, or won't bother to update or improve their lessons. Gallup determined that 70% of teachers are either “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” from their jobs.^[5]

Some teachers are authoritarian. They enjoy having access to a classroom of children over whom they have authority. Taken to the extreme, some perpetuate physical, emotional, or sexual abuse. This sounds over the top, but abuse is prevalent. Shockingly, corporal punishment (physical punishment) is still legal for public schools to utilize in 19 states and for private schools in 48 states.^[6] In a handful of those states, the authority is still being utilized: 7% of Mississippi students report being victims of corporal punishment, for example.^[7] As for sexual abuse, almost one out of every ten American students have experienced sexual misconduct by an educator.^[8] Emotional abuse is the most pervasive: 62% of students have had a teacher make fun of them in front of others, and 34% had a teacher stooping to the level of calling them names.^[9]

These types of bad teachers are obviously very different, but what they have in common is that they don't have students' interests in mind. If you are going to argue that teachers should have jurisdiction because of their moral virtue or whatever, I would encourage you to reevaluate. They aren't all saints. And although the abusive teachers may be a few bad apples, the teachers who more generally don't act in students' interests certainly aren't.

To be clear, I'm not saying that parents are any better than teachers. I know it can be difficult and uncomfortable to shake our preconceptions of parents as saints who never would want to harm their children, but that narrative is not representative of reality. If we just look at parental abuse, the statistics are horrifying. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, over 533,000 children were victims of abuse or neglect by one or both of their parents in 2020.^[10] And that's just what was officially reported, in one year, from the pool of the most extreme situations. In fact, it's important to keep in mind that, due to the greater power imbalance, it can be much more dangerous and risky to officially report parental abuse than educator abuse.

It's just hard to make the moral argument that teachers deserve jurisdiction over education. Both purport to have student interests in mind, but the statistics don't support that. What sets parents and teachers apart, and what we should be focusing on, are their practical qualifications; teachers are educated in how to teach, and parents are not.

Why Are Teachers So Glorified?

We'll get back to book bans soon, and you'll see in a few minutes why I'm seemingly going a bit off topic. I'd like to point out that there's a bit of glorification going on. The image and reality of teachers are tremendously divergent, as they also are for parents.

There are a number of sociopolitical forces coming together to elevate the status of the “parent”, and an in-depth look into those forces is much bigger than this essay. Quickly, I'd say that our patriarchal, capitalist society has designated childcare largely to the nuclear family rather than the extended family or the greater community. I wouldn't be surprised if the COVID lockdowns, where students were placed back in the home full-time, strengthened this sentiment of household individualism.

As for the glorification of teachers, I actually think it's a little simpler: the power of teachers' unions. To be clear, I am very pro-union. Anyone who has been unfortunate enough to have spent an extended amount of time with me knows this. Unions are critical for increasing worker power and thereby improving working conditions. In my eyes, they are an important stepping stone to achieving democracy in the workplace. But things change when the stage shifts from a two-party game — employees and employers — to a three-party game or more.

The prime example of a three-party game is with the police. Police are employed by the government to (ostensibly) protect citizens, but police unions have consistently acted as impediments to oversight and systemic reform. A University of Chicago working paper investigating police departments in Florida found that “collective bargaining rights led to a substantial increase in violent incidents of misconduct”.^[11] Unionizing, a supposedly equalizing force, helps police but hurts citizens.

Sociologist Mark P. Thomas and labor geographer Steven Tufts argue that police unions prevent reform by invoking “the language of social justice/civil rights movements, in effect, casting police as victims and thereby rendering invisible the marginalisation of racialised populations.”^[12] Police unions also “maintain symbiotic relationships with right-wing authoritarian populist politicians”, reinforced by over $87 million in local and state lobbying over the past two decades.^[13]

Like police unions, teachers unions also don't work within a two-party game. Police are (ostensibly) meant to serve the third party of citizens, while teachers are meant to serve the third party of students. And like how granting police officers more power doesn't help citizens, granting teachers more power does not necessarily help this goal of helping students. Though there are limited studies, there is little evidence that schools with teachers unions and higher teacher protections for “academic autonomy” are associated with higher student performance; in fact, it may be the opposite.^[14] Of course, correlation doesn't equal causation, and “student performance” tends to mean standardized test scores, which can be problematic. But the point is, there is simply little evidence to support the unspoken assumption that the actions that benefit teachers necessarily benefit students.

Teachers unions, like police unions, also wield tremendous political influence. Between 1989 and 2010, the two largest teachers unions (the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers) spent $59 million on federal elections, 95% of which went to Democrats. And on the state level, it's even more extreme: in 2008 alone, teachers unions spent $24 million on statewide candidates and $37 million on ballot initiatives.^[15] This enormous amount of spending places them among the top political contributors. And giving politicians boatloads of money is obviously going to have consequences: namely, preventing oversight and systemic reform.

In his book Special Interest, political scientist Terry M. Moe wrote, “while the Democrats have been champions of the disadvantaged in virtually every other area of public policy, education is a glaring exception. In education, and in education alone, Democrats are the party of conservatism. … Their alliance with teachers unions has taken true reform off the table” (10).^[16]

But what does preventing reform mean in practice? One example is tenure: it is extremely difficult — and I mean extremely difficult — to fire a tenured teacher, especially for poor performance. Moe investigates how teachers unions have influenced state legislatures — typically Democratic — to mandate that arduous procedures be followed before a tenured teacher can be dismissed (183–188). Journalist Scott Reeder found that between 1987 and 2005 in Illinois, only seven tenured teachers on average were fired per year — two for poor performance, five for misconduct. That's out of an estimated 95,500 tenured teachers — a rate of 0.007% per year.^[17] I mean, this is crazy — no selection bias can alone account for this rate. The vast majority of districts never even tried to fire a tenured teacher for that 18-year period, because not only is it difficult, it's also extraordinarily expensive; between 2001 and 2005, the average cost of a dismissal case to Illinois school districts was over $219,000.

You might be wondering why we're talking about teachers unions when this essay is about book bans. The issue is that teachers unions' social-political capital has allowed them to successfully shift the framing of school issues in terms of teachers. There are countless news articles about book bans, but many aren't about how they are affecting students, but how they affect teachers. Teachers are scared,^[18] teachers fear prosecution,^[19] they're “walking on eggshells”.^[20] Notice even how President Biden first mentioned book bans: at an event for educators.^[21] And of course, these are completely valid and important concerns, but this framing creates a fundamental misunderstanding in how we understand the issue. It's either “parents rights” or “teachers rights”, and we aren't talking about who these conservatives are targeting: students.

Other Parties in Education

Like in the case of police, all of our problems would not be solved if we just disempowered teachers unions. Actually, I don't even think teachers unions are the biggest problem practically. I'm focusing on teachers unions because they are deemed to be the solution by many liberals and leftists, who hear “union” and don't investigate further on this unique situation. I'm focusing on teachers unions because they are the obstacle to better solutions.

It's actually been difficult to find good sources for this essay because most of the people lambasting teachers unions have just a general anti-labor slant. For example, I felt weird citing Terry M. Moe earlier because some of his critiques of teachers unions are based on an unspoken assumption that improving teachers' working conditions is not a value worth pursuing in itself. But teachers are people too; they deserve good working conditions and good pay. A U.S. Census report found that not only do teachers not make nearly as much as similarly educated workers, their pay has decreased significantly over the past dozen years.^[22] Let me be clear, teachers do need union power.

And although there isn't evidence that teachers unions don't bring increases in student performance, they do champion academic autonomy. Part of “academic autonomy” is protecting bad teachers, but another part is protecting the freedom to access information. Remember, school boards and administrations are banning books, while teachers unions are fighting to keep them on the shelves.^[23] But also keep in mind that teachers unions are only fighting for academic autonomy because it's in their best interest to do so. Their fight for student autonomy will generally only go so far as it retains teacher authority.

If we only disempowered teachers unions, it would just give more power to school administrators, who are even further removed from students. Among other things, this separation causes administrators to be more interested in test scores than the wellbeing of students. Administrators too have their own interests, like trying to raise money and prestige to the school, which can conflict with the student's interests in their individualized education and welfare. Providing more power to administrators will inevitably limit academic freedom and diversity of thought. By being high up on the food chain, administrators are largely unaccountable — similar to teachers right now. Administrators can often be more hostile to good reform and accountability than teachers are. Even if an administrator was a pure altruist, going against their own interests for those of their students, their inherent separation from the classroom does not allow them many insights needed to act in students' interests.

Unlike policing, education is actually a four-party game, encompassing administrators, teachers, students, and parents. But parents often don't work in the interests of their children either, largely due to their lack of qualifications. Bringing in parents as curriculum designers would understandably cause tremendous harm. Not to mention, this is all assuming that the parent has good intent; the harm is further exacerbated if the parent is abusive, which is all too frequent. We have seen how the voice of only one parent is needed to influence an entire district's policy — who do you think the loudest voice will be?

A Paradigm Shift

We need a paradigm shift. The teacher–administrator dialectic [in philosophy, tension or opposition between two interacting forces or elements^[24]] is ineffective at an inherent level, and likewise is the parent–school dialectic. No one is actually acting in the interests of students. Who could?

Guys! The answer is simple! The students will act in their interests. Students are ultimately the best judges for determining what they themselves need. If this is a question of ownership, students should have ownership over their own lives.

I know this sounds kind of radical. I mean, if we allow students to have self-determination, who is going to determine which books should be banned?!

I've been kind of avoiding this question, but which books should be banned? This obviously depends a lot on larger questions concerning gender and racial education, and fully investigating that requires entering the culture wars. We really don't need to get into that. I think we do have a shared concern, though: what I think people are actually worried about, in principle, is that the curriculum will be manipulated to force students into a particular worldview. This manipulation is only possible when there is some party acting as the guardians of knowledge.

We can resolve this issue by reimagining education itself — envisioning a new type of school that is student-centered. We can move away from mandatory curricula that can be manipulated to restrict students to a certain worldview. We can instead engage in reality and meet students where they are. Teachers and parents wouldn't be supreme guardians; they can be guides, each with their own special skill set, who help students explore the world.

In principle, students should be free to access information. Of course, this doesn't mean that access should be completely unfettered. But instead of banning books, we could treat students like the individuals they are by contextualizing them. If a student is curious about engaging with a potentially inappropriate book, we should help them understand why they might not be ready or mature enough to properly engage with a book, or why it may be controversial for them to do so. Educators, parents, academics, communities, and fellow students can all have input in providing context. If this context is sufficient and convincing, a student will opt to put down these books on their own accord.

But, at the end of the day, even though it might feel uncomfy at first, we have to leave the final decision to the student. Banning a book from being accessed at all is a fundamental infringement of liberty. If you notice, in this paradigm, we're shifting what a “book ban” even means: instead of banning books from being taught, it means banning books from being accessed, which is more extreme and less agreeable. This new lens reveals the real issue: restricting teachers is only the mechanism by which legislators, administrators, and parents have been restricting kids.

For everything I'm saying, I also want to be careful about potentially glorifying students. If we do move away from mandatory curricula, a big problem is that of the incurious student. I really do think that almost all of us are born with an innate sense of curiosity, but not all students are interested in learning subjects we traditionally think of as important. I would say that if a subject is actually important, we articulate this importance competently, and the student doesn't have underlying mental or emotional issues that need addressing, the student would want to learn it for their own benefit. Research has also shown that providing students with greater academic autonomy is linked to greater self-motivation.^[25] Student academic autonomy is also linked to greater well-being, if we care at all about that.

An Uphill Battle?

I would argue that centering students' right to learn is, in theory, rhetorically easier to defend. The alternative is presenting a dilemma between two guardian bodies, teachers or parents, that is ultimately irreconcilable. Although centering students will also be an uphill battle against the status quo, it is one that has unique appeal: we can contrast parental overreach with principles of self-determination, democracy, and freedom.

In practice though, we face many challenges. Fully actualizing the idea of a student-centered school would require a lot of problem solving. Even just completely articulating what such a school would look like is a massive task, and definitely not one I can fit in a single essay. But actualizing the idea of a student-centered school is a project of a century—a project that I'm proposing we only begin engaging with. This means small changes; for example, we don't have to abandon a standardized reading list just yet; we can start with simply reducing its emphasis and giving more space to student exploration.

We do also have a very real strategic problem: although we have seen movements consisting of the youth, we have not had a real mass movement centering the youth as a distinct party. This work to build solidarity among students has to start now, and we have little to build off of. But we don't have nothing. We will need to push for legal rights in the legacy of Tinker v. Des Moines, a landmark 1969 Supreme Court case, which ruled that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate”.^[26]

In terms of secondary school book bans, the 1982 U.S. Supreme Court case Board of Education v. Pico ruled that if the ban was meant to deny access to ideas that the proponents disagreed with, it violated the First Amendment. However, the ruling was limited in various ways. For one thing, it did not prohibit the argument of “vulgarity” or “education suitability”, whatever that means.^[27] The ruling itself was also weak, with only 4 out of 9 justices joining the plurality decision, and a fifth, Justice White, wrote in a (frankly annoying) concurring opinion, “The plurality seems compelled to go further and issue a dissertation on the extent to which the First Amendment limits the discretion of the school board to remove books from the school library. I see no necessity for doing so at this point”.28 The loophole of “vulgarity” and the ambiguity of the ruling's strength has allowed the current wave of book bans to thrive. This case is especially notable because the lawsuit was brought by a group of middle and high school students, and thus the ruling centered on the First Amendment rights of students.

Further litigation like this — perhaps when the Supreme Court is a little more friendly to civil rights — is essential to furthering a student movement and preventing book bans. Whether it's at the local, state, or federal level, legislation like a student bill of rights could explicitly enshrine protections to students. Just bringing these issues into conversation would be progress from where we are now.

As we've seen, students cannot rely on the schools or the teachers unions to fight for them. To students at affected schools, here's my advice: set up independent frameworks to facilitate resistance and adaptation, through advocacy and organizing.

Beyond all the jargon, what does that actually mean? Well, you could do what I did in high school: establish a student union. This is different from a student council in that it creates student power independent of administration and faculty. Ideally, any student can join and contribute to the union, which reduces corruption and builds solidarity. A student union would aim to influence the school by exerting pressure on existing sources of power, like school boards, student councils, and teachers unions. The union could do something like set up a book ban noticeboard, with information on what books are being threatened and how to voice opposition against restrictions.

A student union can also engage in mutual aid. Joel Izlar, a community worker and social scientist, defines mutual aid as “the building and continuing of new social relations where people give what they can and get what they need, outside of unjust systems of power”.^[29] In this case, this means helping your fellow students while not relying on the institution of the school. For example, you could set up an underground library, where students can access and contribute books of their choice — physical or electronic.

In my personal experience, while it's important to build strategic relationships, asking nicely just won't cut it. Almost no real change has ever been made by just asking nicely. You have to push further, go beyond what has been done before. This work is difficult, but it is necessary.

Conclusion

Book bans are ultimately a result of the authoritarianism inherent in our current educational paradigm. When we debate about “teachers rights” vs “parents rights,” we unknowingly presume that it is ok to restrict educational materials from students; these positions only differ in who is the gatekeeper of information. The left needs to realize that although teachers unions may work towards good reform more often than administrators and the loudest parents, they can still hinder the protection of the most disadvantaged and disenfranchised in education: students. A paradigm shift is needed to center student ownership over their own education, which will require students to take their fates into their own hands. Only then can we properly fight book bans.