What if We Ban Books that Can Teach Us Empathy?

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I am all for protecting children from unsafe experiences. I do not want children reading books that are inappropriate for their age or emotional abilities.

Not everything published in a book is worth reading, for children or adults. But that assessment needs to be done thoughtfully and with the skill of experts, like teachers, librarians, and literary scholars.

What if we ban books from schools and libraries because we don’t like what they say or are uncomfortable about what the stories tell us and how they make us feel? If we are banning books that teach us about the lived experiences of others who are different from us, we risk removing a significant way that children and adults gain empathic insight.

How Can Reading Help Us?

When we read, especially novels that describe and share the stories of people’s lives, we learn new things about places, history, and lived experiences different from our own. Books can make us think about ourselves, how we might approach the situations faced by the characters in the book, or what we might feel in their situations. If we read books together, in a classroom or a book group, we can be led to talk about difficult topics with the support of others. Sometimes a book helps us face things we fear and don’t understand.

Research on reading and empathy suggests that the two are related. Reading and being transported into a character's feelings can help us develop empathy¹ and can even help us take action to change ourselves and the world around us.² It may be the act of reading and discussing the meaning of what is read together that helps us understand ourselves and others, and that process also builds empathy.³ Research finds that reading narrative fiction can increase perspective-taking,⁴ and perspective-taking is a skill necessary for empathy.

Likely we all recall books that moved us, made us think deeply about our own lives, and taught us things beyond our personal experiences. Not all books are the same to all readers, so we benefit from the suggestions of what to read from people we know and respect, like teachers and book reviewers, and friends. Limiting our choices of what to read risks limiting what we can learn and share with others.

What Reading Cannot Do

Reading is not the perfect road to empathy. We need to be careful not to think that reading a book means knowing everything about a culture or different group. We also need to know that reading to get facts and information can lead us to “knowing about” something or someone, but not “feeling about” that experience or with another person. Without that sharing of feelings or being transported into the narrative, we are less likely to be moved to change or take action. Reading will never take the place of real experience, but it can lead us and prepare us to go to places that give us those real experiences.

Embrace the Challenge of a Book

Books are a way to explore places that we may never get to in person, both literally and figuratively. Of course, some books are better at that than others, and that assessment may vary from person to person. But if we remove and ban books because some of us don’t like what is in them, we risk closing off an important way to learn about others and share feelings that we might not otherwise experience, which means we are closing a valuable door to empathy.