Episode 14: Let’s read all the banned books

Why do books get banned, and why should we read them when they do? Get ready to update your secular homeschool reading list.

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Hello and welcome to Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy. Brought to you by SEA Homeschoolers and home.school.life. I’m Amy. 

Blair: And I’m Blair. 

Amy: And we are here today to talk to you about, one of my personal favorite things, which is banned books. Let’s talk about banned books and why we should read all the banned books.

Blair: I wonder if people thought you were gonna say the patriarchy . 

Amy: In all fairness, there’s a big correlation between books getting banned and the patriarchy’s interest in what books get banned. 

Blair: Although it’s not dads for liberty. It’s moms for liberty. I’m just gonna be super judgy here, everyone. It reminds me of the moral majority that was always a minority, not a majority.

Amy: The issue, of course, with groups like Moms4Liberty is that they’re not actually for other people’s liberty, therefore controlling the narrative, therefore building the things that they want within the structure and kicking the things that they personally don’t want out. 

Blair: I am way more cynical about it. I think that they bring in money, they pocket that money. First person that alerted me that the Moms4Liberty person wasn’t very ethical was Sean, my 24-year-old. So that group, really not a Moms4Liberty fan, that sort of age group.

Amy: That makes sense, because it’s their liberty that’s getting curtailed the most aggressively. These are the people who want to read those books, who are the right age to read them, and who are having them taken out of their lives. Classroom libraries who have great experiences with those books in their classroom libraries and then now they see them getting pulled out of classroom libraries.

I think that’s really, maybe I should start complaining, Blair, about the white capitalist patriarchy and just get it all in there. No, Blair, teases me, I have really strong feelings about, like, how the patriarchy is subtly behind, the white patriarchy specifically, is subtly behind all the problems of modern civilization. 

Blair: So Amy’s going to start with a personal story. And then I did a little research about something and I’ll explain to you after Amy shares her personal story. 

Amy: My first experience with censorship was when I was growing up, and I want to say before I start that my relationship with my parents is a complicated one, but one of the things that I’ve always really appreciated about my mom is that she would buy me whatever books I wanted — I don’t know if you guys got the Scholastic book order form in school We got the Scholastic book order form, and my mom would let me get every single book — I don’t even know how she spent that much money on books for me, but she would let me buy every single book so I want to say I really appreciated that she was willing to let me read any book I wanted to. But here’s where the censorship comes in.

My mom, who was a very conservative Christian, Republican person with all of that implied in the 80s, would read all of the books before I read them. And she would go through with a black magic marker and black out any words or scenes that she thought were problematic. 

So I could read any Judy Blume book I wanted to, for example. But all the swear words would get blacked out. Any references to anything remotely sexy would get blacked out. She did leave the period stuff in, which I thought was cool. but I want to tell this story because I actually think that my mom is an example of what I would call reasonable censorship.

She did not try to stop me from reading the books that I wanted to read. She just went through and picked out the things that she thought would be terrible for me, and blacked them out. And it wasn’t like she was handing me a book that was, like, mostly blacked out. She, as an individual, individually decided what she thought was appropriate for her kid to read.

She did not send the blacked-out books to my school library and say, No one should be able to read these sections of these books. She did not call the school and say, These books should not be on the shelf of the library because they have these things in them. She made a choice for her individual child.

It was a weird choice. And I make fun of it a lot. But The point is, I think this kind of censorship, parents deciding what’s appropriate for their children, is totally fine. Parents deciding what’s appropriate for other people and their families is really shady and gross. Do you agree, Blair?

Blair: I do agree. Tell us, Amy, did you ever, try to figure out what the words were under the blacked out marker?

Amy: Okay, I really hope — I don’t think that my mom ever listens to my podcast, and just so you know if you hold the book up like a certain way to the light you can totally see what the words are So I knew it was like a weird little compromise that we made.

Blair: I inhaled books. I think I’ve told the story in the podcast already that I come from four generations, including my son, that we know of, people who taught themselves to read between two and a half and three. And we started inhaling books the minute we could read them.

My parents just gave me anything I wanted to read. Unlike Amy’s parents, my parents were not conservative and they were pretty liberal. I come by my liberal democratic roots honestly, in that regard — not that my whole family, I’ve got a lot of people in my family that aren’t as liberal as I am, but growing up, I had a liberal ability to read whatever I wanted.

I can remember a big conversation at dinner one night, a dinner party, and one of the people who had started his own school in New York. I grew up in Long Island.

And the kids could read anything they wanted, they just had to read. And so what they found was that a lot of kids that didn’t like to read, if you would let them read comic books, would become the top readers in their class and that their vocabulary improved dramatically because the thing about comic books and if you haven’t looked at a comic book in a long time, there’s some pretty advanced vocabulary in comic books and so my parents fell into the feeling that I could read anything I wanted to read and I read Years above my grade level. And so I often would just read the same thing. My parents were reading once I got to be in about middle school, probably about sixth grade. 

So actually this episode was suggested by Kat, because she said, hey, it’s Banned Book Month in September, your September 1st episode should be about banned books. And as we were planning and talking about this episode, I thought, it’s the weirdest thing. Nationally, I see the conversation about banned books in California, we’re not really talking about this. So I researched to find out why that was and on September 25th, 2023, our governor banned the banning of books.

He signed a bill into law to curb book bans. And the intention is to combat discrimination in schools. where books are, Pulled out of schools on the basis of the race or sexual orientation of characters or topics in the books. This is part of Newsom’s focus on educational freedom. Which he defines as the right for students to access a comprehensive and inclusive education that reflects the diverse experiences and perspectives of all Californians. This concept emphasizes the importance of protecting students rights to learn about various viewpoints and histories.

Newsome has stressed that educational freedom includes the ability to engage with materials that foster understanding, empathy, and an accurate reflection of the world and society. He believes educational freedom protects the rights of families to be involved in the educational decisions affecting their children.

I think that’s really interesting because the Moms for Liberty cohort say that they’re protecting families and yet it’s families who have had to fight back. Families that want a more inclusive perspective and they don’t want certain books pulled. Now I went searching to see if any other states had a law like California.

And actually, Illinois beat California by about three months to enacting a law that’s similar to the one in California. The governor of Illinois signed a law that withholds state funding from any library that bans books for partisan or doctrinal use. This law is designed to combat the growing trend of book bans, ensuring that educational and library materials reflect diverse perspectives and experiences without being subjected to ideological censorship.

The thing about these laws that Newsom and Pritzker are putting into play, protect librarians. And teachers. And so it’s really important that we remember how important it is that there are laws protecting these individuals. Can you imagine as a librarian getting death threats and hate mail? But there are librarians who say that has happened to them. It’s just insanity that people are doing that. I’m telling you, if somebody’s got that much hate in that situation, counseling is needed.

I agree. 

Amy: I think that there is so much misplaced anger that comes out against people who aren’t like you in the world today. And I think, can we just address the sort of, what I think of is the central irony of book banning in the United States, which is that most of the people who are banning books are banning them because they don’t reflect some version of Christian values.

But the Ur text of Christianity, the Christian Bible, the Old and New Testament, as a book, would be banned under basically every single thing that is mentioned as a reason to ban a book. The Bible would not be allowed to be on any shelves. And so I feel like that irony suggests that there is more at work than just these are things that I don’t want my child exposed to.

I really do think it’s these are people existing that I don’t want my child exposed to. 

Blair: To me, the irony there is even bigger, and it’s that these people who are espousing Christian values could not tell you the root word of Christianity, could not tell you what the person who is the root word of Christianity honestly stood for.

Anyway, don’t want to get too religious here. I wonder if there are any spiritual doctrinal text that wouldn’t be banned, maybe Buddhist.

Amy: At least some Buddhist philosophy would get banned, right? Because it talks about multiple manifestations of God. So that would be, like, religiously inappropriate in schools that want to ban things that aren’t Christian. Yeah. I was trying to think of a better way to say that. But yeah, aren’t Christian is really the answer. I’d be concerned about banning books that aren’t about being gay, say, right?

Books that are just about a family that happens to have two dads, or a kid who happens to like to wear dresses and play baseball. Banning books like that where the story is not oh, here is my great revelation. Here is like my coming of age experience in this. It’s like saying that these people existing is somehow immoral, and like it does not seem like a very big step from banning a book about a trans five-year-old to banning trans people.

Blair: I would agree with you, and I think that might be part of the reason. I think part of it’s just money in their pockets. They can raise money off of the issue. I don’t know. maybe I’m being way too cynical.

Everyone feel free to disagree. Yeah, Amy, Let’s bring some history into this, and then let’s go to talk about books that people can incorporate, what people should do to celebrate banned book month. Can we relate book banning to book burning, which is another type of censorship — is the burning of books just a really outrageous amplification of book banning? And we take real issue with the Nazis burning books. Is it the same thing as banning books that’s happening now? 

Amy: Honestly, I’d rather somebody take a book that they hate and burn it in their backyard than try to get that same book taken off the shelves at the library.

Censoring literature has a long and storied history in Western civilization. From almost the very beginning of the time that people were writing things down, People were arguing that those things should be banned. If you look at, for instance, Athenian history, right? If you go back to classical Greece and Athens, you can see dozens and dozens of arguments recorded where people are like, this book shouldn’t be allowed to be read by children.

That is why Socrates, the famous philosopher Socrates, one of the crimes that he was accused of was corrupting the youth because he was giving them information that their parents didn’t think was appropriate for them. And this was even before the right-wing Christian religion was around. So Western history is full of people trying to control information and access to information.

We talk a lot about the medieval period. And how most of the learning was kept within monasteries and was limited by the church. So that people, it was on a need to know basis. And new information was rejected if it didn’t match up to these kind of religious ideas. But that didn’t stop then. In the 18th century when people started to, like, the novel got invented, right?

And people were like, children should not be allowed to read novels because it will rot their brains. They will absolutely rot their brains. So they will not be able to be intelligent human beings. They will learn all the wrong values from novels.

So I think it’s interesting that it is more common in Western civilization to see people trying to ban books than to read. I guess as long as people have been trying to defend it, there have been people who have been fighting against it, but it has happened in every period of Western history.

It’s very different in the East, I think. 

Blair: In the East or the Southeast? 

Amy: Like Asia, the Middle East. They have their own stuff, but in a different way. 

Blair: PEN America, the Freedom to Write, which is a wonderful resource for anyone who wants more information about books that are being banned. Here are the eleven books that are the most banned in the first half of the 2022 23 school year. The first one is GenderQueer: A Memoir. 

Amy: It’s a really lovely book. 

Blair: Tell us who should read that book and why everyone should read it. Amy? 

Amy: I definitely think that this is a book that older middle schoolers and high schoolers should read. Because I think it addresses really frankly and thoughtfully what does it mean to not be gender conforming? What does it mean to make decisions about how you want to be?

The person that you are every day, what are the ramifications of it? What are the possibilities of it? There’s a little bit sexual in there. So if that’s something that you’re like, you haven’t covered that with your kid yet and you want to save it for a little later, that would totally make sense.

But there’s nothing in there that I wouldn’t let a late middle schooler or high schooler read. 

Blair: Okay. Flamer. Have you ever heard of that? 

Amy: I don’t know that one. 

Blair: Flamer is, I don’t know. We’re gonna have to look up Flamer spelled exactly like it sounds like it is. Okay, you look up Flamer. I will go to two that I have read.

One is A Court of Mist and Fury by Sarah J. Maas, which people love that book! Come on! The problem with her books is people think there’s too much sex in them. I guess that’s it. It’s this whole thing where there’s this purity culture.

Amy: People who talk about too much sex in books should have to explain what enough sex is. Like what’s the sufficient amount of sex? If they can explain that I’m willing to listen to them say that it’s too much.

Blair: That amount of sex was in something for boys, would they still have an issue with it I would like to know and then the other book The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.

I am so offended any time I see that Toni Morrison’s books are banned, really because it’s so racist. Her goal is to, is the way she portrays what it was like to be an enslaved person and the fallout and the after effects. And, yeah, you know what? That’s uncomfortable as heck. 

That’s uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable, and it’s a story everyone should have to be forced to face some of that discomfort. 

Amy: I think it is a hard book to read. And when I read it in my high school lit class we had — I grew up in a really small town and there were like three Black students in the entire school. And one Black student in my AP Lit class when we read that, and I think that having classroom full of white, privileged kids who didn’t realize that they were privileged talking about this book with one Black student must have been really hard on that student in ways that I didn’t recognize.

One thing that I tried to do as someone who teaches is to not create situations where people who’ve been historically marginalized have to be the spokesperson for their community with a reading assignment. I think that as a teacher, you might choose not to teach that book in a mostly white class to be respectful towards students who don’t want to have their experiences tokenized or who don’t want to have to be the spokesperson for all the people like them. 

Blair: I could see that. I had my son read Beloved and coupled that with Between the World and Me. That’s not just a really important story to read, but Ta Nehisi Coates is absolutely, like Tony Morris, is absolutely one of the most talented writers I think that I’ve ever read. Simile and metaphor. I had to read the book three times because the first time I got so caught up in the magic of just Coates’ writing, I had to read it again before I could teach it. And then my son and I would make notes. So I did this thing where, I would read it and make notes through it.

And then he was required to make notes. So all of our books we used in middle school and high school lit have writing all in them. So I would really talk about some of the powerful messages that was coming from the books. I think that’s actually a really great way for you to teach it in your homeschooling. And the reason I say that is because you’ve got a lot more experience and you’ve got a perspective that’s generally more nuanced. So he had to respond, but then he had to write things that he noticed as well, so that then I would read through and read those. And it’s a really powerful way to teach literature in a homeschool situation.

Amy: I love collaborative annotation. I think there is almost nothing as effective for reading complex texts. And, it’s also like. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but when you have a teenager or a partner, sometimes it is easier to talk about things, big, important things when you’re driving, because you don’t have to look at each other, and I think annotating a book is the same way, It takes away some of the vulnerability of speaking out loud and lets you get your ideas straight and put them down so that you’re able to be more open and be a little braver about making connections and extending what you’re thinking.

And I love that about annotation. 

Blair: And Coates, if you don’t know the story, they banned his book . And so he showed up and said that he didn’t think that Between the World and Me should be banned. That’s pretty powerful. 

Amy: It looks like Flamer is about a gay kid who gets bullied at Boy Scout summer camp in the 90s. Again, like this is an experience that a lot of people have and reading about it builds empathy and understanding. And I don’t understand how empathy and understanding are things that we wouldn’t want our children to have. 

Blair: Part of the reason that’s important to teach is because kids, people who don’t bully, who don’t have a problem, but who aren’t a part of that community, so it’s never happened to them. a lot of times you’ll see oh, that doesn’t really happen, that’s not really happening. When it is, but because it’s not someone’s reality, something they’ve seen happen. They don’t recognize the importance of paying attention, to the possibility of it happening. And. That is upsetting. 

Amy: A logical fallacy, too. Because I haven’t experienced this, it must not be true. 

Blair: It tells the converging narratives of five troubled teen protagonists. It’s noted for its gritty realism. That’s people who appreciate the book. But there’s sexual activity and drug use in it. 

Amy: It’s baffling to me that there seems to be a subset of people who think that if kids never read about sex, it will magically keep them from thinking about sex until they’re, I don’t know, married or responsible enough. To deal with it. I think the more kids can read about sex, the better; the more you can talk to your kids about sex, the better. 

Blair: I think sex just needs to stop being taboo. You and I grew up in, at a time when it was taboo. And I’m going to tell you, honestly, I wish that it hadn’t been treated as taboo. I frankly think you’re less likely to do some experimenting that in hindsight you’re like, Oh gosh, I wish I had not done that. Or you’re like, maybe if I’d have been able to talk to somebody about that, I wouldn’t have tried it, I’ve always been like way out there with all my kids. There’s no boundaries as far as that goes. Cause I want them to have somebody who is trustworthy to talk to about. but my son, when he wanted to know about sex came to me so we were on a walk.

He said, I’ve got something I want to ask you, mom. I’m like, what? And he goes it’s about sex. I’m like, you can ask me about anything. He said, so I’m wondering what pole dancing is, mom. Pole dancing led to a couple other things. And then I said, so while we’re having this conversation, let’s get a few things out on the table because obviously you’re starting to be curious. And I just want to let you know that people don’t always just have sex when they want to have babies. Most of the time when people have sex, they have sex because it feels good so I told them, I’m like, when the time comes where you’re doing that make sure that you can’t get somebody pregnant unless you’re trying. TMI, mom, TMI. I cannot believe you went there.

But yeah, I was that mom, that embarrassing parents. So if my son wanted to read a book like Tricks. I’m for a family where there’s addiction. I would have been much more worried about that. But we also, had many conversations with my child about that, because I believe the narrative that psychologists have been pushing for years, which is talk to your children about things you don’t want them to do.

Amy: Yeah, don’t just ignore it. Yeah. I think it’s interesting. But because one thing that I would say I think is important is to make sure that — you want to read this graphic novel about a queer kid who gets bullied at camp. You should read it. It’s a great book. Make sure though that you’re not just reading. trauma porn. You want to make sure that all your books about queer people are not books about terrible things happening to them You want to be sure that every book that you read about Black people is not about slavery or terrible things happening to Black people You want to be sure that every book that you read about people who are stuck in bad financial situations are not about people who are stuck in bad financial situations, and it’s terrible.

You want to make sure that as you’re reading books, you’re balancing them. This isn’t banning books. This is just making sure that you are not categorizing people into a category of, oh, being gay is terrible. Oh being Puerto Rican is terrible. 

Blair: Okay, book number four, The Handmaid’s Tale, the graphic novel. I don’t know anything about this. Do you, Amy?

Amy: Oh yeah. So I read The Handmaid’s Tale when I was 17.—

Blair: The graphic novel is the one that’s been banned. 

Amy: — and it changed my life. I think that it inspired what I studied in college. It inspired the way that I lived my life. So I loved this book. And when the graphic novel came out, I couldn’t wait to read it. I was so excited. And I think the graphic novel does an absolutely amazing job with the text.

I think almost everyone knows what The Handmaid’s Tale is about. It’s about a futuristic society where the United States has become a Christian theocracy and women have no rights. Basically no rights. And handmaids are women who, just like the handmaids in the Old Testament, are, like, the concubines, of powerful men.

And their job is just to have children. That’s what they’re there for. To have children. With all the, mechanics that implies. I can see why people wouldn’t want you to read this book, because banning books is a big part of what happens in the novel. It’s part of the way that society ends up in this terrible place that people have to escape from.

Blair: Okay, so I’m going to admit, ooh, it’s my day for sharing secrets. I own The Handmaid’s Tale, not the graphic novel version. I’ve read two chapters of it and I went, no. I know the story, and here’s part of the reason, I was like, I just don’t buy this. It just makes people nervous. And then, especially for some of you it’s baby steps, but sometimes it’s got to feel like you’re moving closer to it.

Amy: The cool thing about that book is that Margaret Atwood’s imaginary theocracy only contains things that happened historically. It only contains things that actually happened in the Western world. They didn’t all happen at once, the way that they do in the book, but that’s why it’s so scary, I think.

Blair: I gotta say, What it is about being stronger and having a penis that makes you superior, I’ve never understood. 

Amy: You will know this because you’re a scientist, isn’t there like a whole school of thought that in fact the XY combo is the result of a broken X chromosome? It’s like an incomplete X? 

Blair: I don’t know. And here’s why I would have to look at that. Two sexes didn’t evolve with humans. the evolution of sex is absolutely fascinating. I haven’t read any good science treaties on it. I’ve read a couple of science themed books, but I call them more pop sci. 

Crank is the fifth now, these aren’t the most banned books These are the most banned books in the first half of 2022-2023. 

Amy: What’s really interesting about this, like the books that people are choosing to ban is, for a long time, books about the civil rights movement, or queer experiences, would get banned because they had explicit sex, or they were very upsetting, or there were deaths.

And so people said, okay, and they started just writing books where gay people existed. It was like just as a fantasy novel, but there’s a gay person, it’s a, science fiction novel, but here’s a Black person and people started banning those too, which really does suggest that it’s not the sensitive subject matter that people want their kids to stay away from.

It’s the actual existence of people who aren’t like them. 

Blair: So the 11 most banned books, that we’re talking about. 10 of the 11 authors and illustrators are women or non binary individuals. Four of the books are written by authors of color and four by LGBTQ plus individuals, identities historically underrepresented in publishing and in school libraries.

So Crank. That’s the next one on the list and it is banned for drugs and It’s the memoir of the author’s daughter battled with addiction of crystal meth. I guess it depends on where you land on that. What about Sold? Do you know the book Sold, Amy?

Amy: Is it also a graphic novel?

Blair: Sold is a book about a young Nepalese girl who struggles to survive after being sold into sexual slavery. 

Amy: I could see that there are stages of my kid’s life where I would have been like, I’m not sure that’s a book that I want you to read right now. I’m sure that there’s a lot of difficult stuff in that book, but again saying I think my child needs to be a little older before they read this and banning books are two totally different things.

Blair: Also, I feel like it is something that kids need to know about. Then the book Push, which contains sexual content and emotional abuse. But it largely focuses supposedly on people being erased. Oh, and there’s profanity in it. Oh, I see. Wait, the protagonist uses profanity frequently. And supporters of the book say it puts a human face on victims of incest and child sexual abuse. Again, like Sold, I could see that being really tough stuff.

Now, we’ve already talked about A Court of Mist and Fury and The Bluest Eyes. Then there’s This Book is Gay.

Amy: Oh, that’s a great book. Our sixth through eighth graders read that book and loved it. 

Blair: Tell us what it was about and tell us who might like it, Amy?

Amy: Oh gosh. So it is really a book about the experience of being LGBTQ and so I think everyone would like it and read it. I would maybe even do it as a read aloud with elementary students. Why was it banned?

Blair: Because this book is gay? 

Amy: Sure, yeah. So yeah, it’s very gay. I highly recommend it. 

Blair: A poetry book called Milk and Honey has been banned. 

Amy: Oh, that’s funny. 

Blair: It mentions sexual assault and violence. 

Amy: My high schoolers love Kupi Kaur, yeah. But they love her poetry. They are all over it. And I say anything that makes kids excited about poetry is a Why would you want to get rid of that? 

Blair: Okay. The states with the most book banning? Texas, Florida, then Missouri. oh, wait a minute, South Carolina. The five big ones are Texas. Utah, Missouri, South Carolina, and Florida. 

Amy: I feel like first of all, the great thing about banning books is what Kurt Vonnegut said, that the best way to get somebody to read a book is to ban it. I think people banned several Kurt Vonnegut books over the years, including Slaughterhouse Five, which I would argue is a masterpiece.

 so one great thing about book banning is that it definitely points kids towards books that they might want to read. So that’s useful. The other thing is that it is really easy to incorporate banned books into your homeschool because they’re really just books. With the exception of a couple of books on the most banned list, I would have read all of these books with my kid in middle school and had no problem with it.

Probably I wouldn’t have read about crystal meth with my sixth grader. Probably I wouldn’t have read about sexual slavery with my sixth grader, but I totally would have read these books out loud as just part of our homeschool reading list.

think that one of the best thing that you can do is show support for these books.

Number one, by checking them out at your library, show the librarians that there’s a market for these books, that people want them, that they’re interested in them. If your library doesn’t have them, ask your librarian to order them. This is a really normal thing. Librarians get this all the time. They have forms that you could fill out. They might even have, like computer stuff. So you can totally request books that aren’t at your library.

Donate books to your homeschool group or co-op. I know there are a lot of banned picture books that are so much fun. I buy them for my students. Sometimes we read them out loud at lunch, where we do a little picture book read aloud at lunch. And high schoolers love that. They really love it. More than little kids even. So donate them to your co-ops, to your homeschool groups.

Go to your local bookstore. Ask if the author can come in and sign them. Ask if they have signed author copies. Make sure that they order the book. Do that sneaky thing that authors do when they’re at a bookstore.and find the books that are banned and turn them out. So that they’re flaunting themselves on the shelf. They’re really easy for people to see.

Basically just normalize it. Give them as presents. For kids birthday parties, for holidays, just get banned books out there all the time and let people know that these are books that have value to you and your family, which is the best way to make sure that they stay on shelves or that they get on shelves at all.

Blair: My advice is to read big, meaty, meaningful books that cover topics that give your child broad perspective of what’s going on in the world, and that means including topics that can be controversial and can be uncomfortable. It’s okay to be uncomfortable sometimes. And when you’re educating children around some of these societal issues and history social studies issues if you’re not uncomfortable you’re not tackling some of the realities that will make your child more thoughtful about what the lives of others might be like and might look like. I think it’s so important. That would be my number one advice, and I would read them with your child.

Make sure that you have discussions about this. If something is uncomfortable, if you have a particularly sensitive child, Skip some of those topics. Charlotte’s Web is, and Where the Wild Things Are have been banned. You don’t have to get too crazy to include banned books.

I think it’s important to acknowledge that some books are banned. You, homeschool, so you get to read whatever you want. Homeschooling’s like the California, Illinois, of the educational, the academic community.

But then, my other tip, I can sum up in one word, vote. 

Amy: [00:39:00] Yes. Also I think that it’s worth considering ways that you may encourage censorship in your homeschool without thinking about it. I know that as a homeschooler, sometimes we feel like we want to make sure that we’re being academically rigorous, and one way that can play out is I see a lot of homeschoolers talk about twaddle. And by twaddle, they mean books that are just fun to read, that don’t have like literary merit, per se.

And I say, let your kids read what they want and do not be judgy about it. If your kid wants to check out the same book every week because they love that book and they just want to read about frogs or magic gardens over and over again, really, why would you stop them? Why would you want to limit their choices as long as they’re reading other stuff too?

If they’re reading a book that you don’t think they’ll like or that you don’t think was very good does it really matter? I think we can subtly encourage censorship that makes it easier for our kids to accept book banning and not because we’re bad parents or because we like support censorship in any way, but just like with our attitude, I think that there are ways that we can communicate to our kids that some books have value and other books don’t.

And literary merit is an important topic and one that you want to talk about with your kids But mostly kids should read things that they’re excited to read because they want to read them. 

Blair: There’s some cognitive science of learning that supports allowing kids to reread things. One of the things that happens when kids start to reread things is even if they’re not thinking about it, they’re paying more attention to how the text is structured, different phrases that are used. One way that reading extends to writing is the phrasing of certain words that go together. Once we see one word and the first couple letters of another word, we have an idea of what’s going to follow. And so that can be really important. Your child get some metacognitive [00:41:00] benefit. 

Yeah. So that, is that a wrap? 

Amy: It’s a wrap. I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up doing another episode sometime about banned books, because there really is a lot to talk about around it. And I feel like it is in the homeschool world. It’s almost like your to be read list, right? You see a book is banned and you’re like, oh, I want to put that on the school reading list. 

Blair: I don’t pay that much attention. Part of that is because I’ve got a college student now who’s reading, just had me buy, oh, the book that is about the Civil War, that’s fun when your child starts to read it as an adult, young adult, and looking at what choices they make — he likes non fiction I cannot remember the name of the book. it’s been on The New York Times bestsellers — there’s people listening to this who know exactly what the book is because it is It’s about the aftermath, oh, Demons of Unrest. 

Amy: History books are fascinating. The Devil in the White City? About the Chicago World Fair?

Blair: Yes, and then the book I can’t remember the other book , now I can look up Eric Larson. Read these yourself if you like this area. Devil in the City of Angels and, The Splendid and the Vile. 

Amy: So that is a wrap for this episode of Secular Homeschooling with Blair and Amy brought to you by SEA Homeschoolers and home.school.life. So fun to chat with you today about banned books and our obsession with reading them, and we will look forward to seeing you soon.