There Is No Such Thing as a Banned Book: Censorship, Authority, and the School Book Controversies of the 1970s

What accounts for the persistence of school book banning controversies in the United States? In Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982), the Supreme Court ruled that book removal violates children’s right to read, but school book challenges have only increased since then. I argue that Americans have been unable to put this controversy to rest because a misleading narrative of censorship framed the Pico case and has continued to frame the question since. That narrative depicted what is fundamentally a contest between competing adult authorities—educational professionals and parents—as instead a contest between children and adults. By reconstructing the development of this narrative by young adult authors and professional educators in the 1970s, I show that the invention of children’s “right to read” in this period sought to discredit the legitimate democratic authority of school boards over curricular decisions in a way that left the conflict simmering and unresolvable.