Banned books, education, and the environment

Attempts to ban books from schools and libraries are symptoms of a larger problem of selective ignorance; our kids and our planet are paying the price.

This is Banned Books Week, a time promoted by the American Library Association to increase public awareness of attempts at censoring books, the successful or unsuccessful tries at pulling books from library shelves or keeping them out of schools.

According to the ALA, individuals and organizations tried to ban 1,247 different titles from libraries last year, a surge driven by persons and groups demanding censorship of multiple titles. Almost every state has at lease a few books that were challenged. California had 18 book challenges. And Texas lead the nation in attempts to pull books off shelves, with 54 books challenged.

Almost half of the censorship attempts concerned books whose subject matter was about or touched on gay, transgender, or other sexual expressions that a lot of straight people have a problem with, or they were about black people or other minorities.

The other subjects folks want banned included books on climate change and the environment. Last November, the GOP-controlled Texas State Board of Education rejected seven of twelve proposed eight grade science textbooks over objections to the way the books covered climate change and the solutions they offered. The books were also rejected because one of the publishers has an environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policy, which the right wing in this country has turned into a bogeyman

There are always folks who want to keep you from reading.

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Texas is among half a dozen states that do not adhere to the Next Generation Science Standards for elementary and secondary education. These standards developed in 2013 by the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, emphasize that climate change is real, is caused by us humans, and can be mitigated if we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. While the Texas standards allow for the teaching of climate change, the causal relationship depicted between our actions and the heating planet is weaker than the Next Generation Standards, and critics of Texas say that the state’s textbook standards don’t properly inform students of how the effects of climate change can be lessened by reducing emissions.

Trouble with teaching climate change

An article in USA Today from September of last year reported that many students in American schools feel that they have not received the education that they need on climate change. The article quotes Laura Schifter, a senior fellow at the Aspen Institute, who said that climate change “is insufficiently taught in American schools.”