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Grades level iconsGrades 8–12
Session time icon60+ Minutes
Genre information iconMemoir, Persuasive
Resource type iconSparks

The Freedom to Read

Presented by: The New York Public Library
At a time of rising book bans, The New York Public Library invites all teens to reflect on the essential freedom to read.
What Your Students Will Learn

Your students will learn about the current trend of book bans in the United States and how to engage with nonfiction prompts.

What Your Students Will Produce

Your students will produce an essay or personal story about why the freedom to read is important.

What You Will Do

Why Is the Freedom to Read Important to You?

Last fall, at a time of rising book bans, The New York Public Library hosted a “Freedom to Read” writing contest, open to all teens across the country.

The winning essays are now featured in Teen Voices, a magazine from The New York Public Library. See the original prompt that inspired these powerful essays below:

You may want to consider the following: How have book bans affected you and how have you stood against them? How have books and reading shaped your identity? Why is it important in your community that we share the right to read freely? You don’t need to answer these questions—please feel free to interpret the prompt however you like.

 


 

Educator Note: Below are a few prompts to help students engage with this prompt. You may choose to focus on one prompt with your students, or to give students the option to choose. 

 

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

While book bans are on the rise across the United States, some teens may be relatively unfamiliar with the term or practice. Before you get started, ask students to share what they know about the topic, and if it has impacted them. You can also share the following, from The New York Public Library, to build collective understanding: 

What Are Book Bans and Why Do They Matter?

Books are considered banned when they’re removed from a library’s collection after being challenged by a person or group. Book bans and challenges have reached an all-time high in the U.S., overwhelmingly targeting books for young adults written by or featuring LGBTQ+ people or people of color. Bans and challenges can also lead to “quiet censorship,” which occurs when books are not made available out of fear that they will be challenged. 

Book bans matter because they silence perspectives, erase identities, and eliminate choice. Being able to read about different perspectives and experiences is essential to the free flow of ideas that’s at the heart of our democracy. In uniting against book bans and censorship in all forms, we champion intellectual freedom and the right of all voices to be heard.

For more information about NYPL’s Books for All initiative, including our Teen Banned Book Clubs, visit: nypl.org/booksforall.

 

Prompt 1: Engage with ALA’s Freedom to Read Statement

  • Share: Read the American Library Association’s Freedom to Read statement with your students. Ask students to consider the following quotes from the statement (or one of them), particularly the bolded line(s). 
  • Discuss: What do these quotes mean? How would you rewrite or summarize these quotes in your own words? Why would ALA feel the need to write this statement in 1953? Is this statement necessary today? 
    1. “We believe that free communication is essential to the preservation of a free society and a creative culture. We believe that these pressures toward conformity present the danger of limiting the range and variety of inquiry and expression on which our democracy and our culture depend. We believe that every American community must jealously guard the freedom to publish and to circulate, in order to preserve its own freedom to read.”
    2. “The freedom to read is of little consequence when the reader cannot obtain matter fit for that reader’s purpose. What is needed is not only the absence of restraint, but the positive provision of opportunity for the people to read the best that has been thought and said. Books are the major channel by which the intellectual inheritance is handed down, and the principal means of its testing and growth. The defense of the freedom to read requires of all publishers and librarians the utmost of their faculties, and deserves of all Americans the fullest of their support.”
    3. “We here stake out a lofty claim for the value of the written word. We do so because we believe that it is possessed of enormous variety and usefulness, worthy of cherishing and keeping free. We realize that the application of these propositions may mean the dissemination of ideas and manners of expression that are repugnant to many persons. We do not state these propositions in the comfortable belief that what people read is unimportant. We believe rather that what people read is deeply important; that ideas can be dangerous; but that the suppression of ideas is fatal to a democratic society. Freedom itself is a dangerous way of life, but it is ours.”
  • Write: Ask students to write an essay or personal story answering the question: Why is the freedom to read important to you? They may want to consider the following: How have book bans affected you and how have you stood against them? How have books and reading shaped your identity? Why is it important in your community that we share the right to read freely?

 

Prompt 2: Explore the Current State of Book Banning

 

Prompt 3: Reflect on How Books Have Shaped Your Identity

  • Share: Read the articles and excerpted quotes with your students:
    • “As libraries become battlegrounds, teens notice which books, and which identities, are under attack. Those who share identities with targeted authors or characters receive a powerful message of exclusion: These books don’t belong, and neither do you.” — Ashley Hope Pérez, author of Out of Darkness (from “Ashley Hope Pérez: ‘Young people have a right’ to stories that help them learn” by NPR)
    • “I wrote Flamer because when I was Aiden’s age – that’s the main character of the book, he’s 14 – I didn’t have a book like this to sort of validate who I am. I didn’t have anyone in TV or film that looked like me, sounded like me, that had the same experiences that I had. I was a chubby, mixed Filipino Irish, Catholic kid.  Who did I have to look up to?” — Mike Curato, author of Flamer (from “Banned in the USA Spotlight: Mike Curato” by PEN America)
    • “My favorite book I have read to date is The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, but this book is on the list of the Top Ten Banned Books of 2021. This book did three things: broadened my awareness of racial injustice, put me into someone else’s shoes, and made me want to change the world in whatever way I could.” — Audrey, student (from
      “What Students Are Saying About the Growing Fight Over What Young People Can Read” by The New York Times)
  • Discuss: What books have been important to you and why? What books are currently important to you? Why might it be important for someone to see their identities, interests, and experiences reflected in a book? Why might it be important for someone to see identities, interests, and experiences that they aren’t familiar with reflected in a book?
  • Write: Ask students to write an essay or personal story answering the question: Why is the freedom to read important to you? They may want to consider the following: How have book bans affected you and how have you stood against them? How have books and reading shaped your identity? Why is it important in your community that we share the right to read freely?

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