This post/page may contain affiliate links. Please check out my privacy policy and disclosure policy.

This post contains both factual information and quotes, as well as my personal thoughts and opinions on what is going on.

United States President Donald Trump’s Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (OCR) released a statement on January 24th titled “U.S. Department of Education Ends Biden’s Book Ban Hoax”.

In it they “dismissed 11 complaints related to so-called “book bans”” and “rescinded all department guidance issued under the theory that a school district’s removal of age-inappropriate books from its libraries may violate civil rights laws.”

In the statement, they wrote “the department is beginning the process of restoring the fundamental rights of parents to direct their children’s education”. This, to me, is incredibly dangerous. Teachers are employed to teach and it is not a parents job to teach, nor are they qualified to do so. While as a parent there are plenty of things you can teach your child, you send your child to school to learn and be challenged. By allowing parents to have intervention, this will limit what children actually will be exposed to and learn. Curriculums are almost always very carefully designed to be age appropriate.

According to the release “Attorneys quickly confirmed that books are not being “banned,” but that school districts, in consultation with parents and community stakeholders, have established commonsense processes by which to evaluate and remove age-inappropriate materials.”

This entire situation is incredibly dangerous, and I highly recommend that you read the entire statement (it’s not long). The fact that they used the word ‘hoax’ to describe what went on is incredibly disconcerting and clearly trying to re-write what was going on. A quick look at the American Library Association or PEN America will display how real it is.

And book bans were not just banning books with reported ‘sexual content’ as a lot of uninformed people liked to claim. Books that had LGBTQ+ characters were banned, books with racially diverse characters.

The amount of arguments I had with people that I must clearly be okay with young children reading pornographic content is astounding. A lot of the books banned were not banned because of true sexually explicit content. It was usually because it was not including straight white children or have ‘Christian’ themes, as well as other topics.

According to AP News, “The [American Library Association] called the department’s announcement part of a “cruel and headlong effort to terminate protections from discrimination for LGBTQIA+ students and students of color.””

If this doesn’t scare you, it should.

This means that the government is now fully leaving book control up to states, parents, and local school districts. There will be no oversight meaning one town could remove all books about Black history, another remove every book with any mention of LGBTQ+ and it will continue.

This will also have massive ramifications on education – if a book is banned a teacher cannot use it to teach from. So a book that teaches about the Holocaust in an approachable way for a child may not be available.

And this will just be the beginning.