With respect to the distinction between books that are part of the curriculum and books in the school library, I think it's worth raising that kids are just reading less overall over time (perhaps 2020 being an exception). The proportion of kids who are going to the library and finding something unrelated to their classwork is shrinking. I suspect that the impulse to ban books is caused by the same cultural incuriousness that ironically makes book banning less impactful than proponents would hope. This is _especially_ true for most of the books on those banned lists. Those one of the linked lists includes such barn-burner titles as "The Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine", "Medical Ethics: Moral and Legal Conflicts in Health Care", "Race and the Media in Modern America". Kids aren't casually stumbling across these in the school library and deciding they're worth perusing. If some kid _is_ reading about medical ethics in high school, I'm guessing they're gonna find information about their topics of interest regardless. There are a bunch of books about teen pregnancy and abortion -- but I'm gonna guess that most of the time the teen pregnancies don't happen because someone first read a book literally titled "Teen Pregnancy" and decided they liked it. Similarly "A Baby Doesn't Make the Man: Alternative Sources of Power and Manhood for Young Men" probably isn't actually changing teen behavior. What ever intern in some state legislator's office drummed up suggestions for books to ban must have been pretty lazy.

I'm not saying we shouldn't care about these efforts. But arguing over which books should be ignored in the library reference section is probably less important than figuring out how to get the kids to actually enjoy reading despite being raised in an environment with tiktok etc. And when you get it figured out for kids, tell me, b/c these days I mostly only get through a novel while traveling.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/feb/29/children-r...

https://openlibrary.org/collections/texas-challenged