Book bans and critical race theory: See an idea you don’t like? Rebut it, don’t forbid it

More than 20 years ago, a university colleague of mine pondered the wisdom of social drinking with undergraduates. It would be good, he thought, to have young adults, who are newly independent of the parental and school norms which previously held them, see and model moderate drinking in a social environment. Better to present an updated version of adult constraint than cut teenage college students completely loose to drink without limits.

While there might be merit to such an idea, any college professor who does it today risks unemployment tomorrow.

Current debates about banning books and teaching so-called Critical Race Theory have a similar feel. Specifically, proscribing books and banishing material even loosely attached to the obliquely understood CRT could leave young minds more, not less, susceptible to those very things opponents of those ideas worry about. Here’s why:

In many of his books, UCLA Psychiatry professor Dan Siegel makes clear that the adolescent brain (about early teens to mid-20s) undergoes astounding neurological restructuring. And the first and perhaps most significant change is when the adolescent brain reshapes itself to turn away from — even reject — the patterns of order and authority constraining that adolescent, all for the sake of growing into adult independence.

In other words, that rebellion so many of us felt in our teen years … it’s normal, even to be expected. The challenge for parents, educators, and all of society is harnessing the energy being unlocked in those developing brains, and shaping it toward productive use, for the adolescent and the rest of society.

So what does all that have to do with banned books and ideas? At least three important things.

First, the barring of something may just make it that much more enticing to the adolescent brain seeking ways to revolt against order imposed by the very people from whom that adolescent is trying to separate.

From the Garden forward, the temptation of the forbidden has always proved difficult to overcome. It’s no less so with respect to reading or watching those things society tries to forbid today.

Second, the quality of our civic life also hangs in the balance. When we bar certain material and ideas we lose the chance to more fruitfully and robustly engage and refute them. John Stuart Mill, among others, reminds us how important a “marketplace of ideas” is. He writes:

The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is that it is robbing the human race… If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose the clearer perception of truth, produced by its collision with error.

This means it is better to engage those ideas we don’t like, and rebut them with better ideas and clearer understanding than it is to suppress them.

Third, when banning ideas we also risk undermining trust in the very institutions — like schools — we’re seeking to bolster. When a young mind encounters the proscribed material, untethered from serious intellectual engagement with those ideas, that young mind will engage both the material and a question about why it was banned in the first place. If they are inclined to the newly discovered idea, they will likely see the institutional effort to keep them from it as burdensome and oppressive – of both the ideas and of themselves, as they now embrace an illicit idea.

In this digital age — glutted as it is with all sorts of dubious material — teenagers and adults alike can, and will, find all manner of content that some part of society will find disagreeable.

So banning books or ideas might be a fool’s errand in any case. Instead, more thorough and rigorous engagement with ideas we don’t like — including the opportunity to rebut and refute them — would be a better way to go.

Better for people and better for the community.

I’ll drink to that!

Andrew K. Milton teaches 8th Grade English in DuPont, WA. Formerly a political science professor at several colleges in the region, he also authored The Normal Accident Theory of Education.