It’s Banned Books Week, an annual event that spotlights efforts to remove books from public schools and libraries. In past years it has passed quietly as books have been challenged, but not with the nationwide impact we’ve seen in the last year or so. A new report from the free-expression watchdog PEN America documents “bans” in 138 school districts – many with connections to state actions – affecting 1,648 unique titles, between July 2021 to June 2022. These numbers are likely a floor, derived only from challenges reported in the news or directly to PEN.

To what does PEN attribute the rise? Organized right-wingers, including such groups as Parents Defending Education and No Left Turn in Education. PEN is largely correct about the immediate cause, with people on the right increasingly sounding alarms over “critical race theory” and “gender ideology” in public schools. But as is often the case, the PEN report misses the root cause: public schooling itself, which forces diverse people to pay for, and de facto use, a single system of government schools.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the report is just one paragraph in a sidebar that encapsulates the problem without at all recognizing it. It reduces the problem not to government control, but which government entities are in charge: elected bodies like school boards, or librarians and teachers employed by the system.

Ironically, PEN calls efforts to get school boards or state legislatures – popularly elected bodies – to remove books “undemocratic.” But that is almost the textbook definition of “democratic,” and for many public schooling defenders democratic control is a crucial aspect of public schooling. The people collectively decide what ideas the newest generation is exposed to.

That said, the PEN report is correct in perceiving a huge problem with elected bodies making decisions about what ideas are off-limits to school kids. What if the political majority – or a powerful minority, as PEN asserts about right-wing activists – wants to use its power to impose its values on the politically less powerful? That is dangerous. Indeed, a recipe for oppression.

To protect people without political power government must neither empower experts nor political majorities to decide for everyone what books will or will not be accessible to children. We must move away from government schooling by attaching funding to children and letting millions of families and educators decide for themselves what is right.

A politically equal society is grounded in liberty.