What Are The Pros And Cons Of Book Banning Books In Public Schools?

The Two Sides for the Ongoing Debate of Book Censorship

2,532, this is the number of books currently banned throughout the United States (Friedman & Johnson, 2022). However, because of this, there have been many arguments for whether this action is beneficial or not, especially for the students at public schools. Many public K-12 schools throughout the US have book bans in place. These bans bring forth several questions: what are the reasons and causes for book banning? How will book banning affect the present? How will book banning affect the future? In order to answer these questions, it is vital to understand and examine both the advantages and disadvantages regarding book censorship before making a final decision.

In order to understand

In order to begin to understand both sides, it is important to examine the pros. For starters, one of the biggest pros of banning books in public schools is the fact that it protects youth from age-inappropriate material. Often, the reasons for banning books arise from good intentions as it stems from a “desire to protect children from inappropriate sexual content or offensive language” (American Library Association, 2016). This benefit corresponds to the idea of safety with a child. One of the biggest benefits of banning books is the idea that if a book contains material that is not appropriate for a child’s age, it can be removed from

For starters, one of the biggest cons of banning books is that it can take away from a child’s chance to learn about cultural diversity and different viewpoints. One of the biggest ways children can be able to learn about others is through books and “stu­dents will not be able to un­der­stand dif­fer­ent cul­tures, world­views, re­li­gions, etc., if in­di­vid­u­als keep ban­ning books that have these el­e­ments” (Chiesa, 2021). One of the biggest drawbacks to banning books is that the more books are banned, the more censorship occurs from different perspectives. Furthermore, many of these topics being banned may contain cultural viewpoints that students are unable to learn elsewhere. As these different viewpoints get censored, it can “harm people by taking away meaningful representation that allows people to understand different perspectives” (Sista & Wang, 2022.). As these different viewpoints become censored, it raises an important argument for the debate - if there is no representation of different perspectives, how can students expand their own? The more books become censored, the more this takes away from a child’s availability to expand their social