Books are Windows & Mirrors

We talked about the benefits of reading in our previous blog post. One important benefit is the fact that reading fiction is proven to increase empathy. This fact aligns perfectly with the Country Day libraries’ mission to provide our community with books that can act as both windows and as mirrors. Books that act as windows give us the opportunity to look in on how someone else lives and thinks, what might motivate them, and how they might have experiences unlike any you could even imagine. Books that act as mirrors reflect back our own experiences and help us feel less isolated.

As part of this windows and mirrors mission, the librarians of Country Day celebrate the freedom to read that we have. The books our librarians choose for our shelves reflect the broad interests and diversity of our student body. Every one of our students could walk through our libraries and find several books that reflect back aspects of their own lives, and several hundred that open windows in their minds into a multiplicity of perspectives beyond their own. In this way, our libraries uplift the Country Day mission to inspire students to Think Critically, Live Creatively, and Act Compassionately.  

Not everyone in this country shares the same freedoms that we enjoy here at Country Day. PEN America reported a near-tripling in the already-rising number of book challenges from the previous year, with an unprecedented 10,000+ books banned from the shelves of various school and public libraries in the 2023-2024 school year, as compared to 3,362 in the year prior. As a point of comparison, between 2010 and 2019 the average number of books banned per year in this country hovered around 300. In the past four years, book banning in the United States has increased 3,300%. 

For those not entrenched in the library world, here are a few quick definitions. When an individual objects to the contents of a book, they can always choose not to read it, and to prevent those in their care from reading it. Sometimes, though, they might ask a librarian to completely bar access to the book by removing it from the collection. This is called a book challenge. In the rare case that the decision is made to actually remove the book from the library, thus cutting off everyone’s access to it, we call that a book ban. A book ban is a form of censorship that directly prevents democratic access to knowledge and violates intellectual freedom, a core value of this nation and part of the first amendment to the constitution.

Additionally, PEN America notes that both underreporting of book bans and instances of soft censorship make it nearly impossible to know how far book banning efforts have truly gone to curb our nation’s free access to information. Soft censorship examples include cutting or blacking out particular passages or images in a book and hesitancy by librarians to purchase and shelve certain books for their libraries for fear of backlash.

Our stance against censorship in no way means we believe that every book is right for every person, particularly not at every age. After all, polls demonstrate that the majority of Americans have concerns regarding children’s access to age-inappropriate materials. These same polls also demonstrate that Americans broadly oppose censorship and trust librarians to select reasonable materials for the shelves of school libraries. The trouble with book banning is that it seeks to prevent everyone’s access to a particular material or perspective. “My child cannot read that” is certainly understandable and easy enough to honor. But when the rhetoric changes from my child to all children, it becomes a sentiment which strays from protective parent/guardian into infringing upon others’ intellectual freedoms.

At Country Day we care very much about getting the right books in the hands of the right students. Following guidelines from the American Library Association, we research books before buying them for our shelves, reading multiple reviews from professional book reviewers as well as researching further when the professional reviewers disagree with each other. Even with two libraries on this campus we are still serving vast ranges of ages and interests in each. We work to distinguish the appropriate age levels for every book that goes on our shelves. We will also occasionally ask our younger patrons to acquire parent permission before checking out books with significantly older target audiences.  

We often hear students ask why we promote books that other libraries have had to remove. After all, they wonder, “don’t they ban those books for a reason?” The trouble is, many of these books are banned for things that we at Country Day, and many across the country, celebrate. Currently, banned titles disproportionately discuss the stories of people of color and LGBTQ+ people. A study by the Washington Post found that in the 2021-2022 school year “just 11 people were responsible for filing 60 percent” of book challenges, and they are disproportionately happening in Florida and Texas. 

Fiction is a tool which can be used to help people understand the complex world around them as well as the complexities of their own experiences. Preventing young people from reading age-appropriate stories prevents them from accessing and developing tools which may prove vital to their own development.

Ray Bradbury famously said, “you don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” Banning a book ensures that constituents of that particular library will not get to see that specific experience, whether reflexive or enlightening, represented. They will not have the chance to develop empathy for people like the characters on the pages of banned books, nor to feel understood by written experiences that reflect their own lives. We feel deeply fortunate here at Country Day to continue providing our community with empathy-building titles that reflect the distinct and varied experiences of all. We steadfastly maintain our commitment to the windows and mirrors mission. Young people deserve to see themselves and the world around them reflected on the pages of the books they read. In fact, we all deserve this level of intellectual freedom.