The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - How Does Book Banning Hurt Democracy?

Episode Date: April 8, 2025

Book banning is not new, but author Ira Wells argues it is taking new forms. He joins us to share his new book, "On Book Banning: Or, How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy."See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Renew your 2.0 TVO with more thought-provoking documentaries, insightful current affairs coverage, and fun programs and learning experiences for kids. Regular contributions from people like you help us make a difference in the lives of Ontarians of all ages. Visit tvo.me slash 2025 donate to renew your support or make a first-time donation and continue to discover your 2.0 TBO. Book banning might seem like a product of a bygone era, but according to our next guest, the impulse to block books deemed harmful to children continues to this very day and both the left and right are guilty of it. Let's welcome Ira Wells, who's the author of On Book Banning, or How the New Censorship Consensus Trivializes Art and Undermines Democracy.

He's also an associate professor at Victoria University at the U of T. And Ira, it's great to have you here. It's great to be here. Okay, I gotta do this right off the top, sorry. We're gonna play a little family connection here. Paul Wells, the great Paul Wells, is what to you? The great Paul Wells is my first cousin once removed, which means that his father

is my father's uncle. And who's a better writer, you or him? Oh, Paul. Really? Are you kidding? OK, that's very generous of you. Because we've had both of you on the program now and well, I'm reserving judgment. Let's see how you do.

You had a personal experience in your child's school that got you thinking about this topic of book banning. So let's lay that out to start with. Sure. So I was, well I shouldn't say I was invited, I responded to an invitation to get parents involved with an equity-based weeding process where we were actually was just called a library audit to to begin with and we so we were invited to come to the library it was a very small

committee of parents maybe about five of us and we were asked to select five books more or less at random from the shelves and use something called the TDSB Equity Toolkit to evaluate these books. And this is a checklist of yes or no questions asking things like does this book engage students of all identities? Are any voices silenced in this book? Does it give students a chance to respond or interrupt the status quo? We went through this process and it very quickly became clear that to actually use this checklist

with an entire library of books was going to be a lifetime of work. And at one point in this process, the principal just made a sort of offhanded comment, which I thought was a joke, saying that she wished that she could just get rid of all the old books. And I thought she was kidding, but the next fall in Peel region they actually did engage in what they described as an equity-based weeding process, and the upshot of that were thousands of books that were taken off the shelves. So having gone through the process,

what did you think of the whole thing? Well, it left me alarmed. I was concerned that the people who are responsible for teaching our children how to read have an extremely instrumentalized view of literature in a sense that it's clear that they see literature and children's books as having a very clear job, which is to affirm the identities of the children.

And any book that is not affirming the identity of kids is not a part of their vision of what a library is supposed to do. That's a polite way of saying that they see literature as propaganda for their position. What alarms me about that as an English teacher and a professor of literature is that I don't believe that literature is propaganda. I don't believe that there's a difference between poetry and propaganda and children's literature and propaganda and I'd like to see those two things

separate. When you heard the principal joking. And I'd like to see those two things separate. When you heard the principal jokingly say, I'd love to take all the old books off the shelves, how did you respond to that? Well, I must say that, as I say, I thought that it was a joke. But you weren't sure it was. I wasn't sure it was. But I also realized in this moment

that I didn't have a lot of arguments that I could just rattle off and make the case of why I felt that removing these books was an affront to art and to democracy. You're sitting there in the library in these little chairs with your knees up by your head. And to sort of go off about the importance of art and democracy felt a little bombastic at that point.

But I also just didn't have the arguments at the tip of my tongue. And that was one of the reasons why I wanted to write on book banning, was I wanted to put those arguments in one place. So if people don't have the chance to go off and reread John Milton's Areopagitica from the 1640s or J.S. Mills on Liberty, I try and digest that very quickly and very concisely for a reader.

And you've done it very kindly with only 165 or so pages, so it won't take forever to get through it. We hear stories all the time, usually from Florida or Texas or something like that, about some school board down there banning books and taking them off the shelves. And I suspect our reaction in Ontario most of the time is, oh my goodness, isn't that terrible? Do I understand you correctly to be saying we shouldn't get too holier than now about all this because we're just as bad as they are? So I don't say that we're just as bad, but I say that it's the same process.

And let me put it this way. The parents' rights organizations, which are the groups that you're alluding to that we hear about in places like Florida and Texas, they're associated with groups like Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education. And they are particularly concerned with what they call LGBTQ indoctrination in the schools. They are invested with removing what they call child porn or indoctrination from the shelves, which is censorship. It is book banning.

But in the fall of 2023, when the Peel region engages in what they called an equity-based weeding process and removes books that had been written pre-2008 because they established this 15-year window or when they remove what they call classics because they're too heteronormative or too eurocentric. That, too, is book banning. That is censorship.

And so that's why I call this the new censorship consensus because it's the same problem, that these books are harming children and it's the same solution, ban the books. Let's do an excerpt from the book, shall we? Sheldon, you wanna bring this up and I'll read along for those listening on podcast. Ira Wells writes,

contemporary progressive educators from Ontario bear little in common with parents rights activists from Florida, and their aims are not equivalent. But both treat books as sources of contagion and libraries as fields of indoctrination, and both invoke the vulnerability of children as a warrant for censorship. Both abide by the new censorship consensus, where the school library is a microcosm of the ideal society and books are levers of social engineering. In my ideal society their thinking goes there will be more of this and less of that. More diversity, less racism. Or more

Socrates and Shakespeare, less wokeness. Is this to say that you think what motivates the people who are making these decisions in Ontario is essentially the same as what motivates those in the Deep South? I'm saying that they are both doing it because they see these books as harmful to children. And are they? They believe they are. I believe that in protecting children from the harm of LGBTQ or classic books. Again, I think it's the wrong word, but we can talk about that. That they're, in fact, introducing new sources of harm.

So that by getting rid of what they see as a source of harm, they are, in fact, preventing children from accessing the past, their whitewashing history. They are preventing children from engaging with narratives that might have enriched their life. They are telling children that if you encounter an idea that you find challenging or difficult, the solution is to ban it. I think that's a terrible thing to teach children.

And they're teaching children that they need to think of them or they should think of themselves as fragile vessels of traumatic contagion, which is, I think, the exact, I think we should be teaching children to be resilient and strong and engaging with things critically, not to be shattered when they encounter an idea that is offensive. At what age?

That's a very general question. And we need to be sensitive to the fact that school libraries are not the same as public libraries, elementary school libraries are not the same as high school libraries, so we need to make some fine-grained distinctions. Because presumably you could make a good argument that there are things that a kindergarten or grade one child should not be reading or should not accidentally bump into on a school library shelf. Are we okay to make that argument? Absolutely.

Okay. Do we want to make a list of what would be considered harmful for a four, five or six year old to be learning? Well, I think that our librarians have been doing a pretty great job at that for a long time. Part of the problem that we're encountering here, Steve, is that schools no longer have librarians in the ways that they once did. They're not funded to that extent, so we don't have that caretaker who's involved in curating the collection and developing it over the

long haul who really knows the collection inside and out. And that's problematic for a couple of reasons. One is that they're less able to defend the collection when someone comes in and says you need to remove this. They're not as personally invested. But also they just don't have that oversight. One of the things I learned in your book, which I found intriguing, is that there are just about as many people who take books out of the library as real books as e-books. It's practically the same right now.

So it raises the question, is it actually possible to ban books given that people can just take them off the internet now anyway? Well, okay, so that's an interesting question and I think it cuts two ways. First point here is that you might say, well, what's the point in banning a book because you can just put it online or they'll find it anywhere. So book banning doesn't work. But book banning does work in a couple of different ways. It's not about just eradicating the book from the society completely. Book banning can work by keeping a book out of a child's hands

at an impressionable life stage. It can work by uniting a community against a scapegoat, which is, I think, what we see in Florida. Really part of the work of book banning here is not to permanently remove the book forever, but to bring that community together. I mean, the Florida book banners, they get together in the parking lot, and they wear t-shirts,

and they divvy up their talking points. And it's a way of uniting that community against what they perceive as a scapegoat. So book banning can work in different ways. But to the point of what about those books just appearing on the Internet? I do think we need physical books in physical libraries. You're probably familiar with the organization Freedom House, which tracks net freedom. According to Freedom House, something like 19 countries in the world actually have a

free internet. I think that totalitarian powers and dictators and autocrats would love the idea of seeing all the books online and just unsubscribe. The local public library has somehow become like the hot spot, the locus for so much of this debate. How did that happen? Well, I think it largely started over COVID, where these groups like Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education, which are sometimes called anti-government organizations, they became very concerned with what was in public libraries

and also school libraries. And those libraries themselves, Steve, often have mechanisms for challenging books. So the answer to your question is that public libraries and school libraries are low-hanging fruit in a sense that if you want to book Ulysses, as was banned in the United States in about 1930, leading up to a famous obscenity trial. There's 50 years worth of free speech jurisprudence that you've got to deal with. The idea that you would ban a book at the nation state level

today, well, it's actually now changing. But during COVID, it was much easier to go after a library, to bring parents and unite against your chosen scapegoat by pulling those books from the library shelves. Let me, I'm going to pluck an example out of thin air here and I want you to sort of tell us how you would handle this if you were in charge. Let's say there is a public school in a neighborhood which is predominantly Muslim. And let's say the parents of those predominantly Muslim kids are uncomfortable with the notion of, let's say, grade four or five or six students reading about LGBTQ issues.

And they would prefer that those books not be on the curriculum or available in the school library. What do we do about that? Well, this is one of the most challenging situations that school administrators have to face. So thanks for putting it to me, Steve. Really appreciate that. I think that we need to balance the harm

that students may experience from certain kinds of material with the harms that we introduce when we instantiate subjective feelings of being offended or feeling hurt as veto power against certain books in libraries. That's a great mission statement. I mean as a general statement of principles that is bang on. But what does that look like when the rubber hits the road? It means that you're gonna have some people who are upset. And tough luck. I'm not saying that they shouldn't be listened to, and I'm not saying that we shouldn't communicate with them, be proactive, and think carefully about their perspective.

But I think ultimately our priority has to be with defending intellectual freedom and defending expressive freedom against that veto power that groups will attempt to wield if given the opportunity. As you look at how the pendulum is swinging nowadays, which way is it moving? Which way are we moving more towards, the book banners or those who are still making the case for freedom of speech? Well, I said a minute ago that state-sponsored censorship had given way to this more parents' rights-oriented

approach to censorship. And that is now changing. So at the end of January, the Department of Education, which may not be much longer for this world, issued a... This is in the states you're talking about. This is in the states. Issued a statement saying that Joe Biden's book ban hoax was now officially over. And when you read the press release, what they're saying

is that all these stories that you mentioned, that we talk about on book banning, that the idea that there's any books being banned here is actually just a hoax. That what they're doing is removing pornography from the library, which should never be there. It is book banning. It is censorship. But, it is censorship,

but what you're seeing is an actual, a return of that state-sponsored book banning in a way that has not dominated public discourse from the state level for 50 years. Let's do another sort of example from real life here. I know when I was a kid, Huckleberry Finn was a book that we read. And the N-word is in Huckleberry Finn, and that was a word that was not uncommon to be

heard back in the 1960s and 70s when I was growing up. But today it is completely unacceptable to use that word unless you're in a rap video or something like that. Question becomes, is that book still okay to be taught in schools, or is the harm of, let's say, a young black kid feeling singled out by the use of that word, a greater harm? It's a great question.

You'll get a variety of perspectives on this. I used to teach Huckleberry Finn in my 19th century American Lit course at the U of T. I do not teach, I would never, certainly I would never say the N word allowed in class, and I don't, frankly I don't teach Huckleberry Finn anymore. I don't teach, I would never say the word allowed because as soon as you do, whatever you thought

you were communicating to the students or whatever point you were trying to make gets lost. Because they hear that word, it sets off their alarm bells, Whatever you thought you were communicating to the students or whatever point you were trying to make gets lost right because They they hear that word it sets off their alarm bells and and you can no longer You can no longer teach them in a way that you were five minutes ago. It's not worth it There's a lot of great literature out there So why'd you drop it? because well because there's so much more else there's so much more to teach and because

I Well, because there's so much more to teach. And because I think that part of the job of being a professor is finding books that you can connect with your students. Now, that's a different question than should it be on the library, should we be banning it? And my argument is that, no, we shouldn't be banning it. That the N-word, we need to be able to distinguish between assault of speech when someone calls someone a name and a book that might appear in a 19th century novel.

Pardon me, a word that may appear in a 19th century novel. We need to be able to distinguish between different kinds of harm, and that is often lost in the discourse, where harming children can mean anything from PTSD-style harm to mild discomfort. When you were teaching that book, I don't know if it was ever your practice to ask the students to read excerpts of the book aloud in front of the rest of the class.

But if you did, and if that word was in one of the excerpts, how did you handle it? Well, the dates may be a little off here, but I taught that book in about 2013, 2014. I taught it for a number of years. But there was one year in particular where a religious publisher issued a boulderized edition of Hukfin where they replaced the N-word with the word slave. And I polled my students and I asked them, would you prefer to have Mark Twain's original

version or do you want this boulderized version where they remove all of the N-words and replace it with the word slave? And my students were very clear that they wanted the original, they didn't want a whitewashed version. Something has changed over the past five years. You think the students would make a different decision today? I suspect they would. Okay.

Let's do another excerpt here. This, the Canadian Federation of Library Associations put out a statement on intellectual freedom last year. And here's what they had to say, Sheldon, if you would. Libraries provide a wide array of services to meet the educational and recreational needs of their users. Library users of every age have their own unique sets of values, maturity levels, and cognitive abilities.

Libraries do not make assumptions or judgments about their users, nor do they impose arbitrary limitations upon access to library services. Minors, therefore, should not be restricted from accessing services on the basis of their age, and no service should be excluded on the chance that it might be accessed by minors." How well do you think, first of all, I think you probably love that statement. I approve. You approve, okay. How well are libraries living up to that statement? I think they're doing a pretty good job. I think that our librarians are being tested.

I think that they are facing stress. They're facing pressure from people who, in some cases, will say odious things to them, who will say, you know, if this, and you hear more of this in the States, although it is becoming a part of our reality too, where people will storm into a library and say, you know, you must remove this, this, and this, or if not, I will sue you or I will bring charges against you for child pornography or worse. I think they've been standing firm.

I think that we need to support our librarians so that they can continue to fight for our intellectual freedom. But my sense is that they've been doing a great job. Our friends at the the Center for Free Expression have been tracking these library challenges and it shows that overwhelmingly librarians have been standing firm, they've been defending intellectual freedom. And we should support them in that. Just finally, let's take either public libraries or high school libraries, elementary school libraries.

If we indulge in more book banning, and I'll admit this is a bit of an airy-fairy question, but let's go anyway, what do you think that does to democracy? Well, I think it continues to push us in the direction of if we hear something we disagree with, the solution is to cancel. The solution is to ban. The solution is to further entrench ourselves in our own information bubbles where

we are unable to test our ideas against their opposites. We know that we are fallible beings. The closest we can get to certainty is by trying our ideas against what is contrary, testing our ideas against their opposites. That's the basis of the peer review function in academia. it's the basis of the scientific method. And when we refuse to engage with ideas we disagree with, we're cutting ourselves off not only from, you know, I'm not only preventing you from speaking, I'm preventing myself from hearing. And I think that's what the message needs to get across.

I think you write just as well as Cousin Paul, for what it's worth. Ira Wells on book banning. You've got some fascinating ideas in here, and we are happy to recommend this for people's edification. Thanks for coming into TVO tonight. Thanks, Steve. It's a real pleasure.