Conversations about censorship and book bans tend to exclude the voices of the very population they claim to protect: young people. Now a rising generation is bristling at these restrictions, seeking a more active role in advocating for their own freedom to read.
“A core front in the culture wars is: What does it mean to be a full human being under the age of 18?” says Emily Knox, interim dean and professor at the School of Information Sciences at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a board member of the nonprofit National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC). “We’re in a moment where parents are claiming a kind of sweeping control over their kids, but kids have agency. They’re their own people. The more we can educate young people about their rights, the better off we are as a country.”
This summer, NCAC and Brooklyn (N.Y.) Public Library (BPL) collaborated to host their first-ever Teen Advocacy Institute: Power to the Readers, an eight-session virtual workshop for teens looking to become intellectual freedom advocates in their communities. It grew out of BPL’s Books Unbanned initiative, which aims to mobilize young adults in the fight against censorship.
The program brought together 25 students who each applied to be selected for the workshop, for virtual lectures and hands-on exercises designed to equip participants with the skills and knowledge they’ll need to become effective leaders in their school and library communities. The students were aged 15–21 and represented 12 states.
“The most upsetting thing to me is the blatant disrespect for authors,” says participant Oriana Taylor, a high school junior at Lincoln Academy in Newcastle, Maine. “They put so much effort, research, and emotion into their work, yet most people who complain haven’t even read them. They just saw something online and decided it must be bad.”
Participant Marlin Xie, a first-year student at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, appreciated the practical exercises and collaboration. “I expected mostly lectures or workshops where you listen and take notes,” he says. “After instructional sessions, we immediately applied what we learned in groups, making slide decks, pitching campaign ideas, and drafting proposals we could use in the real world.” Students also built case studies of specific removal attempts, like a Tennessee school board’s 2022 decision to pull the graphic novel Maus from classrooms.
Equally valuable was meeting students in other parts of the country. “I’m from New York City and now I’m in Maine, both relatively liberal places,” Xie says. “Censorship exists here but it’s not as visible as in other states. Meeting peers from places where censorship is more aggressive helped me understand its severity and urgency in a way I hadn’t felt personally.”
Knox led one of the workshops, approaching it as she would a classroom exercise. She went over some basic definitions and frameworks for conversations and intellectual freedom, asked students about their favorite books, and helped them articulate arguments to defend them.
“In my intellectual freedom classes, I start by saying that we’ll discuss topics you may disagree with,” says Knox, author of Book Banning in 21st-Century America (second edition forthcoming in November from Bloomsbury). “It’s not a class about getting mad at people who ban books; it’s a class about freedom of expression. We focus on what it means to engage in support for information access and how to respond to efforts to censor any kind of information.”
The “not getting mad” part is a lot harder than it sounds, students say, but speakers at the workshop emphasized the importance of channeling rather than dwelling on an emotional response.
“This program helped me realize there isn’t just one way to do advocacy, and the best way to change the world is to bring positivity to it,” Taylor says. “It helped me learn how to stand up for myself and others in a more positive way, instead of just snapping when something was wrong.”
“As young people and as students, there are unique constraints and risks in activism,” Xie says, citing recent waves of college campus protests and the backlash in response. “You want to speak up and collaborate with administrators, but they also hold power over you. The Institute emphasized how to be a safe and effective student activist, knowing your rights and advocating for them without watering down your message.”
As with any rising generation, Gen Z gets a lot of knocks, Knox points out, but they’ve been through a lot: a pandemic that interrupted their schooling and social development, rampant bullying, and the pressure of lives lived online and with cameras everywhere.
But Knox says she’s always surprised by the young people she teaches. “They’re passionate—about specific books, yes, but also about the bigger picture,” she says. “They understand that objections to a book can signal adults trying to say, ‘Because you’re a kid, you can’t handle this.’” And above all, she has observed that “Teens are remarkably clear-eyed about what’s happening in their schools and deeply empathetic toward each other.”
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