School book bans, defined as when access to a book is restricted or diminished due to external pressures, have risen by 340% in 2024-2025 from the past year, according to a report done by PEN America, a nonprofit organization dedicated to celebrating creative expression.
Often, these bans occur because people find that subjects such as violence, sexual orientation or identity in these books are inappropriate, English teacher Skyler Draeger said. Sexual assault is another subject that is often considered inappropriate, found in the commonly taught English III book “The Catcher in the Rye,” Draeger said. A lot of classics in literature will be found on banned book lists because they often deal with real life, and real life has situations that are mature, sometimes sexual, sometimes violent, he said. Teaching English without approaching anything that could be offensive is impossible, he added.
“I don’t go out of my way to attempt to teach banned books,” Draeger said. “That’s not how I operate at all. But books open the door to new perspectives for us, and so if we’re going to learn about the world and the society we live in, or the past, being able to read something that is set in that location and has the concerns of that time written into it makes sense, and that’s how we learn.”
English teacher Cindy Ung teaches a variety of banned books in her freshman classes, including “Of Mice and Men,” a novel set in the 1930s during a time of rampant racism, Ung said. Ung thinks that the main reason why “Of Mice and Men” would’ve been banned in other districts was that the novel uses the n-word profusely and almost casually, she added.
“Racism, it’s still rampant today, but it was especially rampant back then,” Ung said. “Steinbeck using the n-word– it’s not to deliberately offend his audience. It’s to clearly reflect the times. And by understanding the times, it helps us understand the belief systems of the characters and real people who lived in the 1930s. That’s what makes ‘Of Mice and Men’ such a fascinating book.”
What reality was could be reality today, and we need to learn not to repeat these kinds of beliefs, Ung said.
“To shield children or teenagers from these truths or belief systems is very dangerous, because they need to know what these are in order to learn that it’s not okay to say the n-word,” Ung said. “I even have a quick lesson with my freshmen about the history of the n-word and why it was used and where it originated from. By censoring that, it’s a disservice to our students as adults to willfully place them in ignorance.”
English teacher Ana Hahs teaches “Wonder” in her ELD class, she said. “Wonder,” a story about a boy who has Treacher Collins syndrome, has been censored in other places because of its use of the r-word, she said. The boy refers to himself using the r-word, leading people to ban it because they believe that schools shouldn’t promote that kind of language, Hahs added.
“But I think for me, it opens up the larger conversation of why he felt the need to use that word to describe himself and what does that say about how sometimes disabled people feel in society because a core theme of the book is how you navigate the world when you are visibly disabled, when you have no way of hiding the fact that you are different from everybody else,” Hahs said.
It is especially important to educate ELD students that the r-word is an inappropriate word to use because they’re unfamiliar with American culture, Hahs said.
“I have a discussion with them about how he’s (the main character) going to use this word to describe himself, but you should definitely not use that word in your own language and speaking because it comes from an older time when we were discriminating against people with disabilities and implying that they were less than human,” Hahs said.
Teaching the history behind literature and giving space for students to discuss is important, Ung said.
“I try to have my students chime in on what they already know about our social structures, like what they know about racism and rape, because they know,” Ung said. “Instead of lecturing them, you need to give students that voice to converse because these are real things. I feel like students forget that what we teach applies to real life, so it’s good to let them talk about it so they can apply that.”
Ung has learned from Mr. Brett Webber and Ms. Ginger Roy to prepare students for triggering and sensitive content before introducing a chapter, she said. She has discussions with her students before reading a chapter in “The House on Mango Street” because of a chapter that contains rape.
