I received a really thoughtful email in response to my Growing Age Divide essay. I asked to reprint it with full citation, but have not gotten a reply, so I will just attribute it to B L-M, a lifelong English professor and teacher.

“I respectfully disagree with your thoughts, not because I don’t believe censorship and restricting books is wrong, but because I think this whole “book banning” thing is a smoke screen. The problem is not that young people are reading the wrong books. The problem is that young people, as well as their elders, are not reading at all. I was a college professor for almost twenty years and it totally broke my heart that many of my students were functionally illiterate, and this is not exaggeration, beyond writing their name, their writing was atrocious. And half of them refused to read assignments, for no other reason than they couldn’t! I made a decision to make much less money by going back to teach high school, hoping I could do more to better prepare young people, to make young people know how to read and understand what they read. For every student I reached, twenty more went on, not hating to read, but simply not reading.

I assigned The Handmaid’s Tale in my classes. Not once did a parent complain due to content. On multiple occasions, however, mommy showed up to whine, “This book is TOO HARD for my baby. Give her/him something easier. Do you have any books less than 100 pages? Some with pictures?” This is what parents are really concerned with.

Book banning – and notice how deceptive and inflammatory the term is – is a political issue, not a larger issue of censorship or protecting our children. People concerned about education are not calling for the restricted access to books. Real parents want their children to thrive, and reading and education are a high premium. No good parent tries to prevent their child from reading, from learning, from real life issues they will deal with their entire lives.

Look, Mom’s for Liberty don’t read the books they attack. Reading isn’t the problem. The problem for Mom’s for Liberty is that there are black people and gay people and sex and smart people in the world that they hate and want gone. They don’t care about gun violence. They don’t care about domestic abuse. They don’t care about objectifying women. Look at the titles on their “banning” lists, which they have never even read.

Book banning is a smokescreen. Hate politics is just about hate. The unfortunate victims in all of this are the young people, many who need every possible encouragement to read. If anything, this is the major benefit of ignorant adults playing politics with their children’s minds: the moment a book is “banned,” it becomes a best seller, and students who ordinarily won’t read anything suddenly find motivation to read.

Having conversations with young people about book banning just further wastes valuable time. Stop talking to young people about what we oppose. Start helping young people talk about the things they want to achieve, and how they can most effectively succeed in a diverse and difficult world.”

Thanks B L-M. I personally think it is a both/and rather than an either/or, but the illiteracy issue is important as well, and I am grateful that you pointed it out.