Banned Books and the Literacy Crisis
by Dr. Jason Aukerman
“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
~ Ray Bradbury ~
I grew up with LeVar Burton. Few things invoke my nostalgia as strongly as the theme song for Reading Rainbow. It takes me back to my childhood in Minnesota and Indiana. I recall my favorite books: Big Max by Kin Platt, Mickey and the Beanstalk, The Fire Cat by Esther Averill, numerous books from the Billy and Blaze series by C.W. Anderson.
We didn’t have cable when I was growing up. My entertainment came from my great-grandmother and the many adults who read to me, and later, from the public library. I was eleven when my family moved to Shelbyville, IN, and I began to haunt the Shelby County Public Library—an old Carnegie concrete castle that filled my head with legends of Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, ghost stories, and westerns.
By the time I reached high school, this love for reading faded. It was an obligation—something that prevented me from watching television or listening to music. I think this has a lot to do with how reading is taught at that level. There, we’re taught that reading is about devices—tone, plot, symbol, irony, and whatever else the no-longer “New” Critics decided comprised good literature. Education has a way of paradoxically trivializing and overcomplicating the study of literature, and it’s a shame. So many people leave their final high school English class vowing to never pick up a Hawthorne, a Poe, or a Welty again. And who can blame them? When The Scarlet Letter is stripped of its real resources in order to mine it for its symbolism, does it have anything left to teach us about hypocrisy, self-righteousness, or the value of nonconformity? When reading is reducing to trite games of “find the symbol in the text,” it shifts the focus from the power of narrative to serve as a window and a mirror, to show us other worlds and other perspectives while at the same time, invoking introspection in the reader.
Things have changed significantly since I was in high school. Many of us are constantly looking at our screens, decoding symbols, reading and watching material that caters to our preferences. Our biases are constantly validated thanks to what Siva Vaidhyanathan deemed “the Googlization of everything.”[1] Yet, in the midst of this, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451—classic tale of authoritarian government overreach and cultural devaluing of literacy culminating in censorship and book burning—remains a bestseller after nearly seven decades in print. Today, books are being banned[2] and challenged by parents and politicians who don’t read; perspectives on race, gender, and identity are being silenced before they’re heard. We live in a world where complexity is avoided at all costs, and nuance is becoming extinct; where a large swath of the public cannot discern between the value of peer-reviewed research and anecdotal evidence; where 54% of adults read below a sixth-grade level; where 21% of the American adult population is categorized as having “low level English literacy”; where more than 4% of adults are functionally illiterate.[3]
This is a bleak prognosis, and I can’t help but worry that we are living in the very future Bradbury tried to imagine and prevent.
And, it would be naïve of me to suggest that there is a silver bullet to this problem—that reading broadly will solve all of our ills. It will not. But, if we work to create a culture that values (rather than disdains) the power of the written word, then we’ll have taken an important first step toward turning the tide of the declining literacy rates in the United States. In Bradbury’s dark future of Fahrenheit 451, the authorities let you ask how a thing is done, but you must never ask why. In charting our forward paths, we must be careful to ask both questions.
[1] Siva Vaidhyanathan, The Googlization of Everything: (And Why We Should Worry) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012).
[2] PBS NewsHour, “Nationwide Effort to Ban Books Challenges Freedom of Speech,” YouTube, March 10, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3f_zHAyhD4I.
[3] US Department of Education, Adult Literacy Rates in the United States. NCES 2019-179, July 2019, https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179.pdf.