The most banned books in U.S. schools

The system they're using is in their faq, in detail. Basically it is books that were previously available but have been removed due to external pressure.

Without the banning method this is just click bait to sell books. Every book on a ban list is still easily available. It would be weird for something as explicit as a kama sutra book to be found in an elementary school library. It might be appropriate at a high school library. But any kid at any time can go to a public library or book store and find just such a book. The parents get to decide when sexually explicit material is appropriate for their children. Schools do the same by proxy. There is nothing wrong with this setup.

because that would suggest something very bad is happening in the US and the HN party line is "this is nothing unusual, typical woke [1] panic attack over nothing, now please get back to your HN job of trying to win VC money"

[1] https://paulgraham.com/woke.html

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Separation of church and state, especially when schools don’t allow alternative books (eg in some Bible Belt areas). Also, the bible does have violence, sex (including rape and incest), etc.

I think OP is over-generalizing. The Bible is the most banned book around the world, but definitely not in the US.

Given the First Amendment, the only thing that I can think of as banned is copyright violations.

The Pentagon Papers case says that, once revealed, classified information can be published.

How about dangerous information. Want to know how to make a fusion bomb? Start at https://www.atomicarchive.com/science/fusion/index.html. More detailed schematics are easy to find.

All that said, I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.

>Yeah this is a strange way to define "banned books".

Pen clearly defines what they consider a ban. Hustler would not meet the definition (hint: it's not because its a magazine).

If you look at their definition, it's when the book is "missing" from the book selection, so it's essentially filtered out from a curated list, not an outright ban.

The school won't kick you out for having the book, but they won't buy it.

It's interesting that people are responding like this rather than answering my question. I know how democracy works and that includes the occasional instances of tyranny of the majority.

That still doesn't address my original question. Is there historic precedent for this type of micromanaging of school libraries (if you're adamant that we shouldn't use the B word) that most of us would still agree with today? Because many of the books on the list seem more likely to follow the path of eventual school classics like The Grapes of Wrath or To Kill a Mockingbird than they are to continue to be banned decades into the future.

I'm very sorry but a bunch of bigots getting on the school board still shouldn't be able to unilaterally say "there must be absolutely no representation of gay people in any books in the library because the presence of LGBT content is pornographic."

Freedom of speech (in the US) protects book publishing too, or do you think school boards are elected, county and state governments are above the constitution?

Well I certainly don't want school boards to determine the curriculum.

>books that schools refuse to carry in their libraries

You are just fundamentally wrong on the facts here. This list is specifically books that were removed from libraries due to outside forces. I'm not worried about school librarians deciding that a book's content makes it unsuitable for their students. These are situations in which parents or government officials are telling the school to remove a book already present.

https://pen.org/book-bans/book-bans-frequently-asked-questio...

I was.. precocious as a youngster and read books that were far above my grade level and what most adults would consider to be "safe" for children.

The first time I tried to check out one of those very adult books the librarian called my parents and asked if it was OK. My parents said "Yes. Let him have whatever he wants." They made a note in my account and the next day they let me have have whatever I wanted.

If that hadn't happened I would be a very different, and much dumber, person now.

I don't understand what the issue is with just asking the parents?

I suspect that most of the people responsible for these "bans" don't want that to happen because some parents will approve of things they don't. Most of this really IS an attempted ban rather than just "appropriate age related content" issue. They don't want to control what THEIR kids can see. They want to control what YOUR kids can see.

Agree it shouldn't be so binary. Only thing I'd add is that I believe it makes sense for schools to err towards restricting books until the upper age limit of "appropriate" because parents who choose to expose their kids to those topics earlier can still do so (e.g. by borrowing the book from the public library or giving their kid more permissive internet access) without having tax dollars used to undermine the values of those who don't. It's not an easy issue but for better or worse, I'd bet what books schools "ban" actually has fairly little impact on what kids are exposed to, so this might all be increasingly a mute point.

Except the definition used in the article, a ban is when a parent group disagrees with the authorities (the librarians) and does not want the book in a tax-payer funded library: "PEN America defines a school book ban as any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished."

So if a librarian goes to a conference and learns, "hey we need to remove these books from the lirbary because they are bigoted/racist/problematic" and they do so, that is not a book ban. But if parents say, "hey this book is not appropriate for our kids, this should not be in a school library", and they raise hell to get it removed, that is a book ban. The whole framing is dumb.

Ah, that's good to understand, thank you for correcting me.

That seems insane to me. There are plenty of bisexual individuals that children will encounter in the real-world no. I could sympathize with banning of books that are of a certain obscenity but if purely because they are bisexual that sounds unhinged