29-05-2025
When we remove books from schools or libraries, we prune the landscapes of children's imaginations
S. Bear Bergman is an author, publisher and parenting columnist whose most recent book is Special Topics in Being a Parent.
One of the few universal experiences of parenting is that we are always scanning the landscape, looking for dangers. But book bans (or restrictions or removals) based on the idea that a book – a book! – could be a danger to a child, are not only ludicrous, they're also bad for children and bad for society. Books aren't a danger, they're a beautiful opportunity – to populate our children's imaginative landscapes in ways that will educate them, inspire them and prepare them to both do right and do well.
In Alberta, this week, a quartet of illustrated books by queer and/or trans people have come under fire, for the crime of depicting their own childhood experiences. Their complaint is that these experiences are too explicit for other children to read about.
Proponents of book banning would have you believe that there are some topics children are simply too young for – racism, colonization, and 2SLGBTQ+ kids and families are high on every list. You'll hear them say that they want to protect their children's innocence, but what they never discuss is that this is only possible for families and children who don't experience racism, which has never once waited to arrive for children of colour. Nor are Indigenous children spared the brutal consequences of residential school until their parents think they can handle it, nor are queer and trans kids (or children from queer and trans families) somehow magically ignorant of their own lives and loves until some external authority approves it.
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In your own home, as a parent, you do get to control what books come into your home library – for a while anyway – just as you can choose to take a sander to the sharp corners of your wooden table after the third goose egg. At home we get to curate what books our children read. Extending the control of home into the public sphere is where we run into problems, in the exact same way you can't then take your sander to the local Tim Hortons and 'fix' their tables. Public libraries and school libraries don't just serve one child or one family, they must serve the whole community.
Beyond that, books that reflect underrepresented identities contribute to what I have come to call 'justice of the imagination,' which has two parts: that any child has the opportunity to see themselves as the hero of a story, and that they can imagine that every kid could be the hero of a story. For kids who are challenged by inequities and injustices, that first experience in particular – to see a kid like themselves, beautifully rendered, in a book – creates the first oasis on an imagination landscape that may otherwise be populated with characters that simply are not the same.
In 1990, Black professor of education Rudine Sims Bishop published a foundational article in which she proposed that for a child, every book serves one of three possible functions: as a mirror, reflecting some part of their experience back to them; as a window into someone else's experience; or as a sliding door (an introduction to an experience they will later have, like going to the dentist or changing houses to suit a custody arrangement).
A book that serves as a mirror can be lifesaving for a kid who feels different and alone in their differences. They might be the only Jewish kid in their elementary school (as my youngest is), a queer kid in a small town where no one else is out, or a Punjabi kid living in rural Canada. Whatever the circumstance, they all crave the validation that comes from seeing their experiences reflected back to them, lovingly, in a book. And for the children (and young adults) whose experiences are already constantly reflected back to them in the books they read, it can only help them in the long run to look through those windows and see other people they may have more in common with than they imagine.
Books aren't a danger; they're an opportunity for justice of the imagination. When we choose to remove books from schools or libraries we are always, always choosing to prune the landscapes of children's imaginations. If we want to give them the justice they deserve, this justice of the imagination, we must push back against any attempt to restrict the content of children's books in libraries and schools. These books help them learn, and – for some of them – help them live.
