BY RANDI SHEDLOSKY-SHOEMAKER

Learning—in all of its forms—represents some change in behavior or thoughts based on direct or indirect experiences. Of course, the range of experiences we can directly access might be limited for a variety of reasons. That’s where books, or more broadly narratives, can provide a pathway to a reality beyond the one right in front of us. Through narratives, students can learn new ideas, meet new people, explore new places—all comfortably from their desks. By traveling into any narrative world, students have the potential to “come back” with greater insight into the complexity of their own world, as well as greater empathy for the people they interact with daily.

Unfortunately, when content bans limit the range of experiences to which students have access, what truly gets limited are the opportunities students have for learning. When students are only permitted access to a narrow view of the world, that’s indeed what they develop. They readily assume that this narrow view is a completely accurate representation of reality—after all, it’s what they gleaned from their formal education. But even if the view is accurate in some spaces, it is not complete. Consider, for example, the experience of novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. As she noted in her 2009 talk, she was an avid reader as a child, but the books to which she had access predominantly portrayed British and American experiences. These stories left Adichie assuming that people like her, a Nigerian girl, did not belong in literature. That assumption restricted her writing early on, as she tried to mimic the stories she had read—assuming those were the only stories that belonged in literature.

Repeated exposure to the same-old narratives creates a false assumption about what experiences are common. After all, if we have seen the same experience, the same people pop up in nearly every book we’ve read, it is easy to assume that experience happens quite frequently, that people like that are common. While such statistical misestimations may not necessarily present a problem on their own, they can feed some problematic judgments. Repeated exposure promotes comfort with a narrative, and that comfort can translate into assumptions about the story’s truth. Additionally, we are quick to assume what is common is good. Meanwhile, narratives suppressed through bans don’t fare as well. Their reduced accessibility translates into people seeing those narratives as less common, less familiar, less likely to be true, and from a moral standpoint, more deviant. Consequently, the stories we read in school inform us about what to believe and who to trust.

As students develop these assumptions about others, based upon their access (or lack thereof) to diverse narratives, they also begin to form assumptions about themselves. For students fortunate enough to see themselves reflected in the narratives they read in school, they can internalize that opportunity as a sense of entitlement. That entitlement can be fueled further by a cognitive bias that leads individuals to assume that good things happen to good people, while bad things happen to bad people—an ideology known as the just-world belief. Although this bias creates a sense of order and predictability in an otherwise seemingly chaotic world, it also prevents us from learning compassion. It leads us to see a world that is fair and based upon our own choices and actions—which any social psychologist will tell you is false.

On the other hand, for students who do not find aspects of their identity represented in the narratives they read at school, that lack of representation can be internalized as self-doubt, powerlessness, anxiety, and depression. Such feelings become distracting and demotivating for students who identify with any marginalized group. Moreover, the lack of representation of any group prevents students from learning about the complexity of human identity and even learning about their authentic selves. Instead, students are left with more of a canned sense of identity, built from a template and mass-produced for ease.

With increased efforts challenging and subsequently removing books from schools—books that disproportionately are associated with members of marginalized groups—it is important to consider how such bans will affect student learning. Students who are fortunate enough to identify aspects of themselves represented frequently in the narratives their school deems “appropriate” will likely feel a sense of entitlement. Students who are not as fortunate—those who have fewer opportunities to identify aspects of themselves in the narratives their school permits may likely experience adverse emotional and psychological effects, that subsequently have costs to their academic success. In the end, although the argument for bans might be to preserve parental choice, protecting that choice of a few has the potential to cost all students—some more so than others.

Randi Shedlosky-Shoemaker is associate professor of psychology at York College of Pennsylvania.