Book Bans And Anti-DEI Laws: Frontal Assaults On Advanced Learner Education and Emotional Health

By Thomas S. Greenspon, Ph.D.

In the recent past, a number of laws have been proposed, and too many passed, by state legislatures restricting the teaching of certain topics in K-12 schools and even in higher education. There has been a concomitant movement to ban the availability of certain books and educational materials. Promoted largely by adherents to a particular political philosophy, the forbidden topics have included such things as historical relations in the US between Whites, Blacks, and Native Americans, as well as the personal subjects of sexuality and gender. The political motivations for these laws and restrictions are topics for discussion elsewhere. The focus of this essay is two-fold: (1) The serious assault on advanced learner education these restrictions represent; and (2) The emotional cost the restrictions will cause BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ students to bear, and the differing, though also profound, negative effects on White, cisgendered, straight students as well.

Note, this essay is not a research study; it is based on clinical and personal observations arising from a decades-long practice of psychotherapy with gifted and talented individuals and families, in whose intimate emotional lives it has been my honor to have participated.

No one who is familiar with a gifted child has missed their motivation to learn; the desire to understand and the passion for meaning-making might well be psychologically universal hallmarks of what our modern Western culture has designated as giftedness. Advanced educational materials are appropriate for gifted students because of the lure of expanded understanding. A primary issue for parents of gifted kids, since organizations advocating on their behalf have existed, is the failure of educational programs to appropriately meet advanced learning needs. The restrictive laws currently being proposed and passed in several states aim to purposely limit what information is presented in schools, thus specifically limiting the ability of all students, and in particular advanced learners, to explore the world as it is. This stunting of the educational process is frustrating, yes, but it also opens the door to a student’s sense of betrayal when the information being denied in school is discovered from outside sources — which of course in the internet age is certain to occur. The bottom line here is that laws restricting information in the classroom, or in the libraries, are direct attacks on freedom of speech, profound frustrations of the educational process, and—most notably for our purposes — a destructive barrier to advanced learner education.

What happens when certain information about the history or cultural experience of particular social groups is limited or forbidden in the classroom? The answer to this will be clear to many parents and teachers of gifted students, who have understood that a primary advocacy aim is basically the recognition that advanced learners exist, and that they have specifiable needs. It is the invisibility of these students and their educational needs — a non-recognition of a significant aspect of their personhood — that affects not just the students’ educational progress, but also their very self concept. In another blog post, I have described the effects of non-recognition in a racialized context (Recognizing Others: A Call to Accomplices On The Path To Equity). Clinical experience demonstrates that the result of this non-recognition is often a sense of shame; a child questions whether they are abnormal or defective in some way, and whether they are deemed worthy of others’ attention. Although in modern Western culture we have a tendency to think of people as isolated units, with emotional states such as shame representing some kind of internal pathological state, current psychological research shows us that we actually understand ourselves in a relational context. Our self-concept is created and shaped in relation to those nearest to us, embedded in still wider cultural and religious influences. Feelings of shame have their origins in our experience of other people’s attitudes toward us.

Laws being passed, and books being banned, aim at preventing certain information from reaching our children. When this information concerns students’ racial background, or cultural history, or sexual orientation, or gendered experience, those significant aspects of their lives are made invisible. If it is forbidden to speak of certain aspects of my life, I am likely to feel shame: “What is so wrong with me that I cannot be seen? Am I a threat to others?” Nor is the silence the only problem in such a classroom. Today we are aware of racial trauma: historical contempt, mistreatment, and threat of the sort that infuses family life and affects self identity and is passed, explicitly or not, down the generations. Black and Native American students bring this with them into the classroom; LGBTQIA+ students come surrounded by an equally pernicious culturally-invoked attitude. Invisibility, by ignoring of the realities of students’ life experience, evokes shame, which in turn significantly interferes with the student’s ability to think clearly.

Nor does this constricted classroom atmosphere affect only BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ students. White students currently represent the dominant culture in our schools. It is White students whose feelings are purportedly to be protected by the educational restrictions we are seeing. It is (certain) White parents who are said to be in need of choices for what their children will learn. Nonetheless, White students in restricted-information classrooms experience the same limitations on their ability to grasp the world around them. They are made either to remain unaware of the realities of their classmates’ lives, or to conclude that those classmates’ lives are not worth understanding. This educational outcome is not something we should countenance for any student, and certainly not for advanced learners.

Where does this leave us? Advocacy organizations seeking to promote and support educational programs of demonstrated benefit to advanced learners have, in my view, an obligation to confront the current wave of anti-educational, anti-intellectual law-making. We must join the public outcry by organizations demanding freedom of thought, freedom of dialogue, and the ability to grapple with even the most contentious of contemporary issues, in an educational environment where thoughtful listening, expression, and understanding are the goals. See, for example, NAGC’s recent policy position. We owe this to advanced learners, because open access to ideas is for them a fundamental educational and emotional need, and we owe it to them and to all students because in a larger context access to differing ideas, and encouraging dialogue about them, is our only realistic hope for altering the spread of an increasingly contentious and violent world.

Related resource links:

• NAGC Policy Position: Support for Culturally Relevant and Responsive Education
• Truthout: Teachers Are Fighting Book Bans and Unjust Firings in Courts and State Houses
• NCTE: Freedom To Teach: Statement Against Banning Books
• NY Times: What Students Are Saying About Banning Books From School Libraries
• Harvard Graduate School of Education: Teaching in the Face of Book Bans
• ASCD: A Framework for Resisting Book Bans
• Unite Against Book Bans: Book Resumes
• Banned and Challenged Books
• Pen America: Cracks in the Facade
• Education Week: No, Book Bans are Never Reasonable
• Racial Equity Tools

Thomas S. Greenspon, Ph.D., is a an author, psychoanalytic institute faculty member, and retired psychotherapist. He and his wife/professional partner Barbara were past co-presidents of the Minnesota Council for the Gifted and Talented and first met in 1962 in the civil rights movement.