UK schools are coming under pressure to remove titles from their shelves. It\u2019s not coming from the place you might think<\/p>\n
For all its talk of free speech, the Trump administration seems remarkably comfortable with censorship. Earlier this year, children studying at Pentagon schools (serving US military families) were prevented from accessing libraries for a week while officials reviewed their shelves<\/a> for titles that might be \u201crelated to gender ideology or discriminatory equity ideology topics\u201d. Trump\u2019s presidency has injected new energy into the book-banning movement that has been simmering for years on the US right. You might think that censoring school libraries would be totally unimaginable in Britain. You\u2019d be wrong.<\/p>\n I worked as a librarian for 10 years, and now I teach on the library and information studies master\u2019s programme at UCL. After the pandemic, I began noticing signs of an eerily similar trend. It erupted in the spring of 2022, when a Catholic school in Croydon invited Simon James Green<\/a>, a prominent gay children\u2019s author, to give a talk. The US anti-LGBT website Catholic Truth ran a campaign encouraging readers to contact the school and protest against the event (one reader said, somewhat implausibly, that Green\u2019s visit to the school was \u201c100% as much of an issue as the ongoing war in Ukraine\u201d). The commission responsible for the school released a statement suggesting the event should be cancelled, teachers went on strike, and the story reached the national press<\/a>.<\/p>\n Alison Hicks is a lecturer in library and information studies at UCL<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" UK schools are coming under pressure to remove titles from their shelves. It\u2019s not coming from the place you might think For all its talk of free speech, the Trump administration seems remarkably comfortable with censorship. Earlier this year, children studying at Pentagon schools (serving US military families) were prevented from accessing libraries for a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38931","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38931","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38931"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38931\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38931"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38931"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38931"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}