Opinion: A Week to Measure Educational and Cultural Character

Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer

As October begins, it’s time for librarians and booksellers nationwide to prepare for a peculiar festival. This is “National Banned Books Week” the one time each year when the normally staid guardians of literature get a little transgressive—though their version involves display tables, caution tape, and bumper stickers that wink, “Censorship Is So 1984.” The theme is new for 2025, but the point is perennial: the right to read belongs to all of us, and any effort to take it away is a public scandal.

The week is less a protest than a celebration, or maybe a reclamation, of how messy, illuminating, and subversive literature tends to be. At its heart, Banned Books Week asks us to consider what is lost when stories become objects of suspicion, and when children are shielded from complexity under the velvet rope of “age-appropriate material.” There is, as always, an edge: the functionaries who markup lists, the wall texts warning which books are for “Student Use!!” not at all, the polite petitions for change. But for one week, it is the book—as object, artifact, rebellion—at the center of the spectacle.

The outcome, as it so often is with American attempts at censorship, is a paradox. The more books are flagged, banned, or challenged, the more readers (especially the curious adolescent ones) rush to seek out precisely what some local board member doesn’t want them to see. Banned Books Week isn’t really about keeping score of titles knocked off or slipped back onto the shelf—it’s about the principle. The week invites everyone, from bespectacled librarians to tie-dye-clad activists, to step out and say: literature should not be policed, selfhood should not be sanitized, and the act of reading—messy, joyfully unrestrained—is an essential right, not a privilege.

So, the banners go up. The caution tape unfurls. Somewhere, a child discovers that the best forbidden fruit is paperback-sized. And for seven days, the book—a sometimes humble, sometimes revolutionary object—finds the spotlight, reminding everyone what’s at stake when a society tries to eliminate difference from its stories.

The past couple of years have witnessed the conflict of books grow in Anderson County.

For over a century, the Anderson County Library and the school libraries in the county’s schools have stood as a pillar of education, open inquiry, and community trust.

Those places were sacred to me growing up in the county. I learned to read at four, and was reading chapter books before kindergarten, and much of this credit goes to my dad and former Pendleton Librarian Helen George. Mrs. George would allow me to help open boxes of new volumes to the tiny old library on the Village Green, and was always eager to hear about what books I was reading, even suggesting similar titles I might consider.

From an early age, my dad loved for me to tell him about books I was reading, and as the years passed offered to buy any book I wanted if I would tell him about it. I was the kid getting a box full of Scholastic Books we ordered each year. But I also found a home in public and school libraries, where the amount of endless information fed my mind and soul.

Books offered glimpses of places and viewpoints beyond the provincial people and concepts of my hometown. They continue to serve this role in my life, and I cherish books as much as ever.

Sadly, these cherished institutions face a mounting threat both from lack of use or funding, and from a politically-driven campaign to censor, ban, or make books hard to find under the guise of “protecting children.” This effort, mirrored across South Carolina and the nation, risks erasing diverse voices and narrowing the horizons of young readers.

Nationally, book bans have exploded in recent years, with alarming frequency targeting materials exploring race, sexual identity, or challenging social norms. South Carolina’s Regulation 43-170 empowers the State Board of Education to remove books statewide without review, delegating censorship powers to a few in positions of authority. Groups like “Moms for Liberty” have fueled a surge in challenges, responsible for a majority of recent bans, a trend reflected locally in Anderson County. Many of these groups have not read much of the material they seek to censor, move or ban, relying instead on national hit lists of books someone else finds “objectionable.”

Locally, the Anderson County Library Board is poised to implement more restrictive policies: raising age limits for access to teen materials, imposing parental consent requirements for challenged books, and encouraging a flood of challenges by granting any cardholder the power to contest any title. All this despite the absence of any recent complaints about juvenile or teen materials in the library and policies that already require children under 13 to be supervised when borrowing.

What makes this especially troubling is that some board members driving these changes rarely use the library themselves, lack valid library cards, or have little connection to the institution’s mission. These circumstances raise unsettling questions about governance motivated more by political agendas than by the needs of the library’s diverse users.

The proposed policies threaten to burden library staff and officials with endless challenges, distract from building a thoughtful, inclusive collection, and erode the library’s role as a safe space for learning. Politicizing library content sends a chilling message: certain stories and identities are unwelcome. Such exclusion harms not only the readers who seek representation but also the community’s commitment to empathy, knowledge, and democratic discourse.

School libraries, which have witnessed less and less use with the advent of laptops in almost all classrooms, face similar scrutiny and are targeted with little or no factual information to justify such attacks.

Concerned parents should be the monitors of what they wish their children to read, and should not be arbiters for what other parents might find appropriate for their children.

Libraries are bridges to understanding, growth, and freedom of thought. They invite readers to explore differences and grapple with complex realities, preparing young minds for a pluralistic society. Shielding children from “difference” under the false banner of protection infantilizes them and diminishes the richness of learning.

The Anderson County Library’s proud legacy deserves better than to be sacrificed at the altar of censorship and political posturing. Parents, educators, and community members affirming the importance of diverse ideas and access to information must stand firm now. Upholding policies that respect parental guidance while resisting sweeping bans will protect the library as a beacon for all.

The future of Anderson County’s educational and cultural character depends on preserving its library as a place of open inquiry, thoughtful inclusion, and respect for all voices—not as a battleground for ideological control. It is a defining moment to honor the library’s mission and heritage rather than succumb to a narrow vision that seeks to silence and exclude.