The US is inspiring education censorship elsewhere

In school districts around the United States, book bans are spreading at an alarming rate. PEN America recently documented more than 2,500 book bans issued across 32 different states during the 2021-22 school year.

These bans are not isolated incidents, but part of a coordinated assault on public education that’s taking aim at the teaching of race, gender, LGBTQ+ identities and US history.

While demands to ban books in schools in the US are not new, over the last year and a half, book banning has erupted into a national movement. Coordinated and highly organised activist groups have transformed school board meetings into political battlegrounds, threatening educators and undermining students’ freedom to learn.

These efforts to censor books are an affront to the core principles of free expression and open inquiry that US democracy swears by. But equally worrying is the fact that this pattern of attacks on public education in the US appears to be inspiring similar efforts in other countries, even though such censorship campaigns haven’t had as much success there yet.

In the United Kingdom, officials are raising the spectre of critical race theory in schools — an issue that was not previously a topic of debate or concern — to try and stop the teaching of histories that explore systemic racism. That’s part of what authors and others have described as a mood “shift” in the UK — a budding “culture war” that is leading to the censorship and removal of books from school shelves. Books being removed are often children’s books that look at institutional racism, diversity and LGBTQ+ identities.

Echoes of US-based group tactics are also manifesting in Canada, with parental groups asking school boards to ban certain books — again with LGBTQ+ content — and seeking to change curricular topics that they see as being part of the teaching of critical race theory. The movement is also gaining the attention of politicians. Australia’s Senate voted against the inclusion of critical race theory in the country’s school curriculum in 2021.

Of course, educational censorship laws and book bans, particularly those aimed at silencing certain peoples, religions, or viewpoints, are tactics that have long been used by governments.

For example, in apartheid South Africa, the notorious Publications Act of 1974 permitted the banning of any “undesirable” material. That could include anything from material that “offended” public morals and religious sensibilities to books that challenged the apartheid ideology or undermined state security.

But the US has always viewed itself as a beacon of democracy — even though it has often failed to live up to its self-declared values and principles. Now, the signs are ominous. In 2021, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance classified the US as a backsliding democracy for the first time.

This year, a Tennessee school board removed “Maus” from classrooms; this Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust has previously been banned in Russia. School districts in Florida and Pennsylvania have banned biographies of women, including at one point former First Lady Michelle Obama, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai. Others have carried out wholesale removals of books, often with LGBTQ+ protagonists, based on unsupported charges of “obscene” content.