Politics | Education | Book Banning

The War on Reading: Learning is an Act of Defiance

Education is a tool of freedom

Knowledge is power.

We’ve all heard that quote before. It’s in movies, it’s in popular television shows, it’s in books and classrooms, and scrawled on motivational posters.

It’s one of those statements that you hear so often that it’s almost lost any meaning. You know, like when you repeat a word over and over again and you find yourself questioning if it’s even real?

The origin of the phrase goes back to 1597, with the first iteration appearing in Sir Francis Bacon’s Meditationes Sacrae. The original Latin quote proclaims; “ipsa scientia potestas est.” Knowledge, itself, is power.

In growing your understanding of the world around you, you gain the ability to engage with it. That’s why little kids are insatiably curious, asking a thousand questions a day. The more you know, the more you can do.

Ignorance is not bliss, it’s blindness.

I am a firm believer in the power of education. I believe it is a tool to empower people and to inspire them to make changes in the world for the better — both for themselves and for others.

I’m not alone in that; there are millions of teachers, librarians, academics, and psychologists who would agree with me. There’s a reason that schools and universities are such important institutions in the history of a nation.

You can see how alarming it is to see those institutions threatened.

It’s alarming, but not surprising in the least. If we accept that knowledge is power, then it comes as no great shock to imagine that some people want to take that power out of the hands of the average person.

In the United States, there is a pattern emerging. A wave of hysteria, aimed at ‘protecting children’ from ‘woke indoctrination’.

• Book bans in school libraries
• Loss of funding for public libraries
• Mass shortage of public school teachers
• Curriculums being altered and whitewashed with misinformation
• School faculty coming under scrutiny and attack

Efforts to hamper free access to education, to limit the knowledge that students can access, and to mandate the teaching of ignorance instead of truth.

Those of us who have studied history are sitting up straight in our seats. We know what this is. This is textbook. It’s a classic opening salvo in the war against democracy.

The more educated the populace is, the more difficult the people are to control. In order to stifle dissent, you must smother access to education.

If there’s one thing an authoritarian government can’t stand, it’s people asking questions. They don’t want that. They want full-throated, unquestioning obedience. The worst-case scenario for them is a society full of well-educated and curious individuals.

The best-case scenario for an authoritarian government is rampant hostility towards academia and intellectualism. They don’t want reasoned thinking based on research and reflection. They want people who are easy to manipulate with lies and emotional buzzwords.

They love the poorly educated.

Authoritarian governments don’t want their people to have access to any information that isn’t provided by them.

Public libraries are the enemy. Schools and higher education are centers of indoctrination that can’t be trusted. Academics are evil elitist monsters who want to see the nation burn. The press is the enemy of the people, and the news is all fake anyway.

Sound familiar? It should; we’ve been hearing the same refrain from dictators the world over. It’s fascism 101, folks.

We’re at the point where we cannot afford to mince words or beat around the bush. The right-wing push against education is a push towards the end of democracy, no matter where it pops up.

Don’t kid yourself into thinking that it couldn’t possibly happen in your country, either. Of course, it could. Checks and balances are only as good as the people holding the reins.

Just look at the current United States Supreme Court.

I’m not trying to drive people to panic or get lost in a sea of despair. That’s not helpful to anyone.

Rather, I want to offer a reminder and a rallying cry. Knowledge is power. Knowledge is sacred. Knowledge is a tool of liberation. Knowledge is the way we nip this thing in the bud.

Right now, the authoritarians aren’t in charge yet. They’re trying to seize control, but they aren’t in the seat of power just yet. They can still be thwarted.

We just need to actually take a step forward to get in their way.

Fighting back against this assault on education is vital. This is one battleground that we absolutely cannot afford to lose.

There is a reason I hammer on this point in my other articles on book banning.

We need to ensure that education remains accessible.

That means preserving libraries, it means ensuring that school curriculums are not tampered with and filled with nonsense, and it means that teachers need to be given a fair shake. They’re burned out and sick of fighting alone, they need the backup badly.

It means a return to respectful investigative journalism, a lightening of tuition fees, and incentives for people to seek higher education.

Get capitalism out of the school system and let poor people through the doors again. There are a lot more of us than there are people who are backed by daddy’s money.

Improving access to education improves the whole of society, not just the democratic process. A strong education system means a stronger economy, stronger scientific community, better medical care, you name it.

Locking people out just leaves the economy stalled, and it leaves the country in the lurch to fall behind on the world stage. There’s a reason the United States is stagnating in terms of global education rankings.

They damn well know it. It gives them one more thing to stir their followers up about, among the dozens of other war cries they’re screaming these days. It’s not their fault the country is a mess, it’s because of the damn libs!

Authoritarianism requires a scapegoat to take power, and right now they’re finding plenty of success.

It’s the elites, it’s the LGBTQ+ community, and our agenda of indoctrinating good Christian kids. It’s the woke left mob and our evil ways! How dare we want kids to know there’s nothing wrong with them if they aren’t straight, white, and cis!

In reality, it all comes down to wanting to hamper the spread of good information and keep people from learning history. The more you learn about the past, the more easily their tactics are recognized.

Ignorance is paving the way for them. But we can still pull the rug out from under their feet; we just need to keep one thing in mind.

Knowledge, itself, is power.

Solidarity wins.

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