The recent outcry over a Tennessee school district removing “Maus” from its eighth-grade curriculum showed that many in the nation are tired of schools and their administrators doing what the Nazis did almost a century ago — banning books, silencing speech, and trampling on free thought. Tragically, the nation is in a moment in time where books are being removed from school libraries, ideas are being censored, and Americans are silencing themselves.

The New York Times recently published a wonderful piece against canceling the written word entitled “The Battle for the Soul of the Library.” The author makes the case for “ideological neutrality in the provision of knowledge” and suggests librarians should leave their personal views at home, “ideally enable[ing] readers to develop opinions based on broad consideration of the available alternatives.”

Libraries should absolutely have material that is unsettling and thought provoking. This is, after all, the point of a library’s educational mission. This means confronting real diversities of ideas and differences of opinion and trying to find truth from within facts, narratives, and history. An Evanston librarian once made this point perfectly, stating that “A good library collection should have something to offend everyone.”

What is missing in this discussion, however, is some sense of how Americans as a whole think about libraries and cancel culture. Fortunately, a recent survey by AEI’s Survey Center on American Life of over 2,600 Americans with an oversample of over 600 parents shines some much-needed light on this question and finds that parents of school-age children do not approve of the dangerous impulse to limit speech.

Specifically,
when Americans were asked if public school libraries should remove any works of
literature that include dated words or references that might be offensive to
certain groups, only 23 percent of Americans either completely or somewhat
agreed with this idea. A nearly identical 22 percent of those without school-age
children agreed that such material should be removed, as well as 26 percent of those
with children of school-age.

When
ideology is considered, it turns out that those on the left are not much more
open to banning books. Only 29 percent of extremely liberal and the same number
(29 percent) percent of liberal identifiers agree that libraries should remove
works that they deem could be offensive to some. This is in line with the 25
percent of moderates who feel the same way. Conservative Americans are lower,
with just 9 percent saying that works should be removed, while 23 percent of extremely
conservative identifiers say the same. While liberal Americans are the most likely
to want to limit access to ideas and prose, the data here show that most
Americans simply do not support banning books.

In fact, Americans
are not interested in sheltering students from new ideas, and instead, believe
they should be introduced to a real diversity of views. An overwhelming
majority (90 percent) of Americans say schools should ensure that students read
authors from a variety of different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Both Americans
without school-age children (89percent) and those with (90 percent) are on the
same page as Americans overall.

Not only do
most Americans believe we should not ban potentially offensive books, the vast
majority of the public believes that we should not steer clear of controversial
topics in the classroom either. Seventy-seven percent of Americans overall
believe that teachers should discuss controversial subjects even if it makes
students uncomfortable. Less than a quarter (22 percent) believe that teachers
should avoid potential classroom confrontation.

Liberals
and conservatives are largely in agreement here. Large majorities of both liberals
(90 percent) and conservatives (70 percent) believe teachers should not shy
away from discussing topics that may make students uncomfortable. Even parents
of school-age children, who may be worried about their children being made
uncomfortable in the classroom, do not believe students should be shielded from
difficult conversations: Seventy-eight percent say that teachers should not
avoid discussing controversial issues in the classroom, almost identical to the
national average.

In the wake of the recent banning of “Maus” in Tennessee and similar bans across the nation, it is good news to see that most Americans think the process of banning books is unacceptable and foolish. Instead, most Americans believe students should be exposed to works from a diverse set of authors, and few feel teachers should shy away from discussing controversial topics in the classroom. This is essential, for in order to really learn, students must be exposed to a real diversity of viewpoints and perspectives, and they must confront these ideas even if they find this upsetting at times. Instead of coddling students by sheltering them from works they might find challenging or offensive, the overwhelming majority of Americans believe these books and ideas have important places in the classroom. We cannot allow a small but vocal minority to control what our students read and think.

Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute

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