What Students Are Saying About Banning Books From School Libraries (Published 2022) (2024)

Please note: This post is part of The Learning Network’s ongoing Current Events Conversation feature in which we invite students to react to the news via our daily writing prompts and publish a selection of their comments each week.

In the article “Book Ban Efforts Spread Across the U.S.,” Elizabeth A. Harris and Alexandra Alter write about the growing trend of parents, political activists, school board officials and lawmakers arguing that some books do not belong in school libraries.

As we regularly do when The Times reports on an issue that touches the lives of teenagers, we used our daily Student Opinion forum to ask teenagers to share their perspectives. The overwhelming majority of students were opposed to book bans in any form, although their reasons and opinions were varied and nuanced. They argued that young people have the right to read unsanitized versions of history, that diverse books expose them to a variety of experiences and perspectives, that controversial literature helps them to think critically about the world, and that, in the age of the internet, book bans just aren’t that effective. Below, you can read some of their comments organized by theme.

Thank you to all those from around the world who joined the conversation this week, including teenagers from Japan; Julia R. Masterman School in Philadelphia; and Patino High School in Fresno, Calif.

Please note: Student comments have been lightly edited for length, but otherwise appear as they were originally submitted.