I think it’s an essential question. I like to start with the American Library Association [ALA] definition of book ban — which is the definition provided by a former president, who defines it as the removal of a title from a library because someone considers it harmful.

The Ontario School Library Association [OSLA] has a related definition of censorship. They describe it as the removal, suppression, or restricted circulation of materials because they’re seen as morally or otherwise objectionable.

What strikes me about both of these definitions — whether it’s the ALA talking about removing a book because it’s considered harmful or the OSLA framing censorship around moral or ideological objections — is these are still structural categories that people fill up with their own content.

So, you could be an evangelical Christian or a conservative Muslim who believes that LGBTQ content on library shelves is harmful or undermines your rights as a parent. Or you could be a progressive educator in Ontario’s Peel region who believes that classic books — though I think that’s a misleading label — are inherently Eurocentric or inherently heteronormative, and therefore harmful in a different way.

The point is, the definition is big enough to capture all manner of censorship, from different ideological perspectives. What they share is this idea of harm — that children are being harmed. And the way that we respond to that harm is by pulling the books off the shelves.

I think it’s part of a larger culture of censorship that has been on the ascendant over the last several years. We’ve seen it in things like the Roald Dahl books, where the language is being flattened — made more anodyne. Rather than using the word “fat,” they’ll use the word “large” or use some kind of euphemism.

I first came across this phenomenon when I was teaching [The Adventures of] Huckleberry Finn — I think it was around 2013. There was a Christian publisher in the American South that published an edition of Huckleberry Finn that removed all the N-words and replaced them with the word “slave.”

I remember speaking with my students about this — it was a very diverse class in Mississauga — and they were almost uniformly opposed to the edited version. They wanted to read Mark Twain’s original. They weren’t interested in having the book excised or whitewashed.

But things changed very quickly between 2013 and 2018 or 2019. I suspect that there are students today who would prefer a bowdlerized version — perhaps out of fear that their classmates would be harmed by the language. I sometimes think that it’s not so much that students themselves are concerned about the harmful language — it’s more a vicarious concern that the language might harm others.

You’re quite right that book banning and censorship have been around for centuries, really since the origins of literacy, and certainly since the printing press. Historically, books were often banned because they were heretical or deemed dangerous to the ruling order —whether that was a monarch, a religious authority, or a political order. They might have been considered pagan or otherwise seditious or immoral.

Later, through much of the twentieth century, we saw state sponsored book banning. In Canada, for example, book banning has its origins in the first sitting of the Canadian Parliament, where they passed the Customs Act, which gave the customs officers power to keep obscene books out of the country.

Throughout the twentieth century, you see different kinds of state-sponsored book banning taking place through attempts to ban books at a national level. You see this with Lady Chatterley’s Lover or Ulysses, or Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. In the United States, many of these bans were ultimately overturned and helped establish key First Amendment precedents.

But much more recently, the nature of book banning shifted. It has been taken up by anti-government organizations like Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education, and other sorts of COVID-era parents’ rights organizations.

I think what happened here is that there was a confluence of legal changes, First Amendment jurisprudence, and cultural changes. It became much harder to ban books at a national level. But it became much easier — if you were of that censorious state of mind — to weaponize the systems that libraries had in place to challenge books in a much more concerted way.

So, now we see these groups circulating lists of books to target — often LGBTQ titles — which they claim are indoctrination or even child porn. And so things did change — we’ve seen more of these anti-government organizations going after books. And now, interestingly — this is beyond where I left off in my book — we are seeing a resurgence of actual state-sponsored book banning. The United States government, in some places, is getting back into the business of banning books outright.

Censorship — speaking broadly — is usually a tool the powerful use to consolidate their power. We can unpack specific cases if you’d like. On inauguration day, Donald Trump proclaimed the return of free speech to the United States. Two months later, he was overseeing action against people who were speaking out on political issues.

We’re also seeing forms of soft censorship — situations where authors had publishing deals that quietly slipped away.

If we roll the tape back a little bit to, say, the 2010s, I think we can see something really important: the political center more or less checked out of the free speech debate. The extremes — both progressives and the far right — have become increasingly hostile to free speech while the middle just disengaged. Why? Part of it was the Citizens United decision in the US, which essentially equated money with speech. People took a look at what was happening with bottomless political spending and essentially concluded that, if speech is tied to wealth, and wealth is so unevenly distributed, free speech can’t be real. That disillusionment led a lot of people to give up on the whole idea.

Then, after Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016, the Democratic Party decided that Russian misinformation was to blame. That, plus the general sense that online misinformation was out of control, made free expression feel more like a liability than a virtue. And, at the same time, you had far-right provocateurs — people like Milo Yiannopoulos — grabbing onto the free speech mantle in ways that seemed pretty obnoxious to centrists and people on the Left. I think all of those factors combined to scare people away — belief that free speech was a sort of right-wing demagoguery became more common.

But here’s the danger: when we abandon our commitment to the ideal of free speech, we’re in trouble. Sure, it’s never been applied perfectly. There have always been groups who were excluded from its protections. But that’s not a good rationale for giving up on free speech as an ideal — because without it, democracy can’t survive.

Yes, I think there are still organizations and people committed to that idea. PEN International, for instance. Jacob Mchangama’s been working on this for years — he wrote Free Speech: A History From Socrates to Social Media. There’s also FIRE — the Foundations for Individual Rights and Expression — in the United States.

And of course Mill himself still resonates. He famously said that even if all of humankind were of one opinion, and just one person dissented, it would be just as wrong for the majority to silence that one dissenter as it would be for that one dissenter to silence all of humankind. That’s about as forceful an articulation of free speech as you’re going to find.

Well, first of all, they don’t call it a book ban. Nobody calls it that. And nobody identifies as a censor.

One of the best illustrations of this came at the end of January, when the Trump administration’s Department of Education — which may be no longer for this world by the time people read this — issued a statement saying that they were putting an end to Joe Biden’s “book ban hoax.”

If you unpack that for a second, what they’re saying is: You may have been hearing from groups like PEN America, ringing alarms about book bans. You may have heard about this whole book banning thing. But actually — according to this line — it’s all a hoax, cooked up by Joe Biden. And that’s now, as far as I can tell, the official position of the federal government — or, at least of that department.

But why say that when according to PEN there was something like ten thousand books removed from library shelves last year — and the true number is almost certainly much higher?

It’s because the people doing the removing don’t see it as banning books. They say they’re removing pornography. They’re removing LGBTQ indoctrination.

So, they’d tell you — sincerely, I think — that they’re protecting children. That they’re defending Christian values or removing material that is contrary to God’s wishes. I don’t agree with them, but I think that many of them believe that argument in good faith.

And I’d say there’s a comparable dynamic on the progressive side. A good example is when the Ontario’s Peel School Board decided to not carry any book published before 2008 because older books are inherently Eurocentric or heteronormative or whatnot, and therefore harmful to children.

Again, I think they’re mistaken — but I also think they believe in good faith that what they’re doing is right. In both cases, you have groups with very different worldviews, but they end up using the same rationale: these books are harming children, and the solution is to remove them.

As a culture, we need to rediscover the value of reading — not just as a way to get information but as a source of deep pleasure and meaning. The children’s writer C. S. Lewis once said that part of what makes us human is the desire to see with other eyes, imagine with other imaginations, and feel with other hearts. And reading is still, I think, our best route to that kind of self-transcendence.

Of course, there are other reasons to read, too. There’s the pure joy of language. Reading a beautiful sentence can take your breath away. Scientists even have a name for that feeling — that shiver down your spine when we encounter something truly moving. It’s called piloerection, that hair-stands-up-on-your-neck reaction. That’s part of what we get from engaging with tradition, with the wisdom of the ages. There are soulful pleasures in deep reading. And I think that we need to remember what we get from the experience of reading — and try to articulate and pass that along to children.

That’s the positive answer.

The more cautionary answer, the negative answer — which is equally as important — is to recognize that censorship itself is a source of harm. When we teach children that the appropriate response to encountering a difficult or challenging idea is to silence it, censor it, or cancel it, we’re doing something corrosive to democratic life. I would hope we could teach children that they’re resilient and strong. That is not the same thing as saying that words can’t harm. That is true, they can. But the concept of “harm” has become a catchall. It now covers everything from legitimate [post-traumatic stress disorder]–style trauma to mild discomfort. And the flattening of that term has consequences.

Finally, we need a reorientation in education — a move toward a nonpolitical cultural space. Because when parents accuse educators of indoctrination, educators have to be able to respond with clarity and confidence. They need to be able to look those people in the eye and explain that education is not indoctrination. Education involves building up critical thinking facilities and faculties. Indoctrination involves breaking them down. Education involves inculcating independent thinking. Indoctrination involves submission to doctrine.

We need to rediscover that distinction. And we need to revive the best spirit of our democracy.