BOOK BANNING is spreading at an alarming rate in school districts across the United States. PEN America recently documented more than 2,500 books that have been banned stemming across 32 different states during the 2021-22 academic year.
These bans are not isolated incidents, but part of a coordinated assault on public education that’s taking aim at the teaching of race, gender, LGBTQ+ identities and US history.
Demands to ban books in American schools is not new. But book banning now has erupted into a national movement. Coordinated and highly organised activist groups have transformed school board meetings into political battlegrounds, threatening educators and undermining the freedom to learn.
These efforts to censor books are an affront to the core principles of free expression and open inquiry that US democracy swears by. Equally worrying, however, is the fact that these patterns of attacks on public education in the US appears to be inspiring similar efforts in other countries, even though such censorship campaigns haven’t had as much success there yet.
In the UK, officials are raising the spectre of critical race theory in schools – an issue that was not previously a topic of debate or concern – to try and stop the teaching of histories that explore systemic racism. That’s part of what authors have described as a mood ‘shift’ in the UK – a budding ‘culture war’ that is leading to the censorship and removal of books from school shelves. Books being removed are often children’s books that look at institutional racism, diversity and LGBTQ+ identities.
Echoes of US-based group tactics are also manifesting in Canada, with parental groups asking school boards to ban certain books – again with LGBTQ+ content – and seeking to change curricular topics that they see as being part of the teaching of critical race theory.
The book banning movement has also gained the attention of politicians. Australia’s Senate voted against the inclusion of critical race theory in the country’s school curriculum in 2021.
Of course, educational censorship laws and book bans, particularly aimed at silencing certain peoples, religions, or viewpoints, are tactics that have long been used by governments.
WHILE we can’t control exactly what happens in life, we can control what we tell ourselves about what’s happened. Emotionally robust people have the ability to reframe situations, even when they seem challenging or scary. By looking for value and meaning in stressful events they are able to see “bad” experiences in a positive light. For example, instead of seeing obstacles as stopping you from achieving your goals, you see them as opportunities to adapt and grow.
Instead of fearing failure, you see failure as a necessary stepping stone on the way to success. Reframing is a powerful way to transform your thinking and boost your mental toughness. It won’t change the situation, but it will put things into a healthier perspective and keep you motivated to keep going. Try it and see what a big difference it makes.
If at First You Don’t Succeed…
It is a continuous effort – not talent or intelligence – that holds the key to success in life. Successful people understand this. As a result, they are action-orientated. Of course, sometimes it makes sense to quit, but don’t make the mistake of giving up too early. Walt Disney’s first animation company went into liquidation and he was reputedly turned down 302 times before he got financing for creating Disneyland. Equally, J.K. Rowling was, in her own words, “as poor as possible” before she found success with Harry Potter, but only after 12 publishers rejected her manuscript.
Ask yourself, are you looking for a quick fix? Do you have a tendency to give up when things get tough? Or do you persevere and keep trying to find a way to make things work? Commit to keep going until you reach your goal.
LET IT OUT
HONOUR your feelings and recognise that difficult emotions such as anger, depression and loneliness are a natural part of the human experience. Let your emotions out by having a good cry if you need to. Crying can help you to regain your emotional balance as it releases toxins that have built up in the body due to stress. You should find that you feel calmer and less anxious afterward.
Another good way to express your feelings is through a creative outlet such as painting, blogging or playing a musical instrument. Creative activities can reduce stress and help you to process your experiences and feelings. The options for self-expression are endless. Whether you write poems, take photographs or draw sketches, creative pursuits offer you the space to deal with a range of emotions in a healthy and constructive way. Find something that gives you release.
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Acquiring Resilience
BEND BUT DON’T BREAK
NOBODY likes feeling stressed, but some people are particularly skilled at coping with upsetting events and carrying on. What is the secret to building resilience, and how can we develop it our ourselves?
WHAT is resilience? The word comes from a Latin verb, resilire, meaning “to leap back”. A resilient person is not someone who never suffers, but one who can suffer and spring back again. It’s a quality that can help us to successfully endure stressful times: studies have confirmed that resilient individuals show a similar increase of the “stress hormone” cortisol when under pressure. We can all benefit from a more resilient attitude.
. A resilient personality?
If some people cope with stress particularly well, does that mean they were simply lucky to have a resilient personality – and if we weren’t born resilient, should we simply resign ourselves to unhappiness? In fact, the opposite is true. Resilience is not a personality trait, and no one is immune to the challenges of life. It is, rather, as a European team of psychologists put it in 2013, “a dynamic and adaptive process”. Essentially, we can learn to be resilient. How we choose to react to adversity can make a big difference. Rachel Dias, a renowned Latin American psychologist, describes it well: “Resilience is not invulnerability to stress, but, rather, the ability to recover from negative events.”
. The Power of Self-Efficacy
A major pillar of resiliency is what psychologists call “self-efficacy”: the belief that our actions have the power to affect our circumstances. There are four key-ways to build self-efficacy, so be alert to opportunities that can increases your sense of confidence and control in the face of stress:
. Persevering through failures
. Finding good role models
. Interpreting our feelings positively
. Social persuasion – for example, if someone says you’re resourceful, maybe they’re right
. Creating a buffer
When we face the stressors that are an inevitable part of life, resilience can limit its impact. A 2015 Brazilian study of people caring for family members with dementia – an unquestionably stressful role –identified a strong collection of traits, resources, and attitudes that built resilience and heightened the caregivers’ sense of wellbeing. These resources include building up good coping strategies, focusing on the positive, self-efficacy, being fully engaged in daily activities and having strong social support.
When we gain resilience we enjoy lower stress, improve our confidence, and have better mental health.
WHAT does justice demand? The basic idea is that people should “get what they deserve,” whether in a court of law (criminals and victims), in broader society (the rich and the poor), or on the global stage (neo-colonial powers and the countries they’ve exploited). But what exactly do people deserve? And what principles can we use to ensure that justice is served, and in a way we might all find reasonable?
Anglo-American philosophy has long been dominated by debates about distributive justice: deciding which principles should determine how goods, opportunities, resources, rights, and freedoms are shared out between the members of a society, or even between different societies.
In A Theory of Justice (1971), John Rawls imagined which principles of justice people would agree to if they were unaware of their position in society and other crucial facts about themselves. He theorised that they would prioritise equality and liberty and would only accept inequalities if they were required to create the greatest benefit to the least well-off in society (the “difference principle”). His colleague Robert Nozick responded in Anarchy, State and Utopia (1974) by suggesting that if people freely did what they wanted with their talents or other resources, this would produce inequalities that would not necessarily benefit the worst-off, but that would be justifiable given the required respect for people’s individual freedoms.
The American political theorist Iris Marion Young argued that the distributive justice paradigm fails to capture important features of public appeals to justice made by women, people of colour, indigenous peoples, and gay and lesbian civil rights movements. These groups are often excluded from political practices of collective evaluation and decision-making about institutional organisation and public policy, and so lack political representation or power. These exclusions constitute injustices, which Young insisted require philosophical analysis. She defined injustice in terms of “five faces” of oppression: exploitation, marginalisation, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence. Justice, through the eradication of its opposite, injustice, can only be achieved via a “politics of recognition” – acknowledging different groups’ experiences and political needs.
Justice in the legal-judicial sense is often understood as corrective or retributive – correcting criminals for their wrongdoing via means of retribution such as fines or imprisonment. The American activist and scholar Angela Davis argues wholesale against prison as a means to justice. She believes that in an age of mass incarceration, the abolishment of prisons is a central requirement for the achievement of justice in a democratic society. There are others, too, who advocate the principle of “restorative judgement” where criminals face their victims to understand the pain and hurt caused. Research suggests that when such an approach is used recidivism and rates of reoffending are dramatically reduced.
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