The Closing of the American Mind: The Importance of Letting the Children Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

I still remember the first time I read The Book Thief. Markus Zusak’s story of a young girl, Liesel Meminger, in Nazi Germany, risking everything to save books from being burned, shook me to my core. I couldn’t put it down, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the courage it takes to protect stories, to protect truth.

It made me realize that stories aren’t just entertainment; they are the lifelines we throw to each other across generations, the maps that help us navigate the world.

And so, when I hear that certain books are being banned in the United States — in 2025 —  in the libraries of the very institutions meant to train young men and women to serve and protect the freedom of thought and expression, I feel profound sadness, and disbelief all at once.

This spring, the Pentagon ordered the removal of dozens of books from U.S. military libraries and schools. The list included works that addressed race, gender, and social justice. The official justification was that these texts reflected “divisive concepts” and “gender ideology”.

However, here’s the truth: what’s really divisive is censorship. When we strip away stories that grapple with racism, trauma, identity, or history, we do not protect our children or our soldiers. We weaken them.

Reuters reported that the purge reached across military academies and K–12 schools serving military families. Politico revealed that even tributes to Navajo Code Talkers and Jackie Robinson were caught in the sweep, removed in what officials later admitted were mistakes.

It reflects a growing trend to suppress narratives that confront uncomfortable truths about racism and inequality. By banning such materials, we risk denying future generations the opportunity to learn from the past and understand the struggles that have shaped our society. The Associated Press (AP) noted the outcry that followed, and the eventual restoration of some historical material. But the damage is done. The message has been sent: uncomfortable truths are not welcome.

And that message is profoundly dangerous.

Books are being pulled from libraries, from schools, from the hands of children who might have turned their eyes to the page and found themselves. The Pentagon has scrubbed shelves, claiming certain stories are “divisive,” too dangerous for young soldiers in training. Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, names that should shine like beacons, are erased, their voices silenced.

At its core, a book ban says this: “We do not trust you with this story.” It assumes that young people cannot handle difficult realities, or that exposure to certain perspectives will corrupt them.

But our children, and our soldiers, are stronger than that. They deserve more credit. Shielding them from pain does not build resilience; it fosters ignorance. Avoiding history does not erase it; it guarantees its repetition.

Children deserve books that reflect the complexity of life. They deserve to see themselves in stories, and to learn empathy for those whose lives look different from their own. To deny them that is not protection, it’s deprivation.

As writer James Baldwin once warned: “Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Books help us face the hardest things. That’s precisely why they are being targeted.

What happens when these stories are missing? We raise children who are less empathetic, less historically grounded, less prepared to face the complexities of the world they will inherit.

It is worth looking closely at some of the recently banned works, because the very content being suppressed is exactly what makes them indispensable.

1. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou

Maya Angelou’s autobiography has been a staple in classrooms and libraries for decades. It tells the story of her childhood in the segregated South. At the age of 8, Angelou was raped by her mother’s boyfriend, an assault so traumatic that she stopped speaking for nearly five years. During that silence, she devoured literature, memorizing Shakespeare, Black poets like Paul Laurence Dunbar, and the Bible. Eventually, she found her voice again, and with it, a vocation as one of America’s most beloved writers and civil rights activists.

Yes, the book describes sexual violence and racism. Yes, it is painful to read at times. However, that pain is real. It is the pain that shaped Angelou’s genius. 

To ban this book is to tell survivors their stories do not matter, and to deny children the chance to witness resilience born out of trauma. Angelou turned suffering into art, silence into song. That is not divisive. That is profoundly unifying.

2. “Beloved” by Toni Morrison

Few novels confront the legacy of slavery as directly as Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” The book follows Sethe, an escaped enslaved woman, haunted, literally and figuratively,  by the trauma of her past. Inspired by the true story of Margaret Garner, a mother who killed her child rather than see her returned to slavery, Morrison’s novel refuses to let readers look away from the brutality of America’s original sin.

The book has been banned repeatedly for its graphic depictions of violence and sexuality. But shielding ourselves from the horrors of slavery does not make them disappear. In fact, it makes us more vulnerable to repeating them in new forms. Morrison once said that her job as a writer was to “rip that veil drawn over ‘proceedings too terrible to relate.’”

Beloved is terrible, yes,  but it is also necessary. To erase it from our shelves is to erase accountability itself.

3. “Between the World and Me” by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Published in 2015, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me” is written as a letter to his teenage son. It chronicles Coates’s experience of growing up Black in America, navigating systemic racism, police violence, and the vulnerability of inhabiting a Black body.

This book is not hate speech, nor is it divisive rhetoric. It is a father’s love letter,  full of hard truths, yes, but rooted in the desire to protect, to guide, to pass down wisdom. For young readers, it is both an education and an invitation to empathy.

 To ban this book is to tell children that certain experiences are too “dangerous” to acknowledge, when, in fact, they are essential to understanding America today.

What We Lose When We Ban Books

When we pull Angelou, Morrison, and Coates from shelves, we do more than censor individual authors. We send a message that trauma should be hidden, that racism is too messy to confront, that love expressed through truth is suspect.

We also deprive future generations of their legacy. Imagine a young Black girl, struggling with her own silence after abuse, being denied the chance to meet Maya Angelou on the page.

Imagine a teenager who never encounters Toni Morrison’s haunting reminder that slavery’s ghosts still walk among us. Imagine a son who never hears Coates’s urgent plea that Black lives are fragile, and precious, and worth fighting for.

What happens when these stories are missing? We raise children who are less empathetic, less historically grounded, less prepared to face the complexities of the world they will inherit. I remember hiding in corners of libraries, trembling with the thrill of discovery. A book, a life, a world, a possibility. And I think of the young Liesel now, their hands reaching for stories that are no longer there. Their eyes widening in emptiness where there should have been mirrors, windows, portals.

Censorship is violence. It is a slow strangulation of the imagination. With it, the flick of a finger across a shelf, and the stories, the lives, the legacies, are gone. And who suffers most?

Adolescents. The young. The children. Our children. Who deserve more than hollowed-out shelves and sanitized truths. Who deserve to stumble, fall, and rise through the words of those who dared to tell the world as it is.

History, identity, struggle, love, pain, all stripped from them. And the world will become smaller, darker, quieter.

Because stories are not frivolities.

Stories are revolutions.

Stories are what make us human.

Our children deserve literature that challenges them, that reflects their lives, and that stretches their capacity for compassion. They deserve to encounter stories of survival, of injustice, of beauty, of love. To take those away is not to protect innocence; it is to cultivate ignorance.

And ignorance, history shows us, is fertile soil for prejudice, fear, and violence. The very things these books seek to dismantle. Yes, they can take the books from the shelves. But they cannot take the hunger. They cannot take the questions. They cannot take the need to see, to know, to feel. And if we are vigilant, if we remember, if we read aloud in secret corners and pass the pages from hand to hand, the words will survive.

The stories will survive.

The fight against book bans is not just about preserving access to literature. It is about preserving democracy. Free societies do not fear words. They debate them. They wrestle with them. They grow stronger because of them.

Maya Angelou once wrote: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” The agony now is collective. Every time we remove a book, we force silence where there should be speech, ignorance where there should be knowledge, and division where there might have been understanding.

If “The Book Thief” teaches us anything, it is that the impulse to destroy stories is ancient, but so too is the courage to save them. Just as Liesel Meminger reached into the flames, surrounded by Nazis and fanatics who were burning books, to rescue a single book, we too must reach into this moment and rescue the stories being pulled from our shelves.

Because the stakes are clear: once we lose our stories, we begin to lose ourselves. The writing is on the wall.

This story was first published in www.independentink.in and republished here with permission.

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Beena Vijayalakshmy is a writer and translator with roots in Kerala, now based in Toronto. An avid reader and lover of literature, she has edited two poetry anthologies — Bards of a Feather, Volumes 1 and 2, and curates a literary page on her social-media handle that showcases the work of poets, writers, and artists from around the world for a growing global audience. By profession a management consultant, she balances her corporate career with a lifelong commitment to literature and the arts. In keeping with her philosophy of lifelong learning, she is currently pursuing a degree in management at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto. By her own admission, she prefers to remain on the sidelines in the quiet spaces between prints.