The question echoing through Oklahoma’s debates over school libraries sounds simple: What is safe for children to read? It’s a question that feels protective, even responsible. But the more I listen, the more I realize we are asking the wrong question — and risking the wrong kind of safety.
When I was a child, my mother paid close attention to what I read. She didn’t hand me the world without guidance. But she also didn’t shield me from books that challenged me. She gave me Animal Farm and 1984 long before I understood every nuance. She believed reading should stretch a young mind, not shrink it. That balance—protection paired with exposure—is what helped me grow.
Today, that balance is in danger.
Reading is not meant to keep children comfortable. It is meant to help them grow. Books are how a child learns empathy for people unlike themselves, how they encounter cultures they may never visit, and how they begin to understand systems of power, justice, and injustice. Reading is the safest way to experience the world beyond your ZIP code.
A library that only contains what is “safe” in the political sense becomes a museum of someone else’s comfort—not a place of learning.
The current push to remove books from school libraries is often framed as protecting children from harm. But discomfort is not harm. Confusion is not harm. Encountering a worldview different from your own is not harm. Those experiences are part of growing up and part of becoming a thoughtful adult.
Harm is something else entirely. Harm is when a child is sexualized, exploited, or traumatized. Harm is when a book is placed in a child’s hands without regard for their developmental stage or without an adult to help them process difficult themes. But that is not what librarians do. Librarians are trained to select age appropriate materials. They are trained to guide, not expose. They are trained to help children find books that meet them where they are and gently expand their world.
The real fight is not about books. It is about authority. Who decides what children may know? Who decides which stories are allowed? Who decides which histories are told and which are erased?
Parents absolutely have the right to guide their own children’s reading. But no parent has the right to restrict the reading of every other child. And no politician should be handed the power to decide which ideas are permissible. When the state begins policing imagination, we are no longer protecting children—we are protecting ideology.
So let’s stop asking, “What is safe to read?” Let’s ask instead: What helps a young mind grow without overwhelming them? That question honors both protection and formation. It respects both parental involvement and professional expertise. And it acknowledges a truth every good teacher, librarian, and parent already knows: you don’t have to agree with a book for it to teach you something.
My mother didn’t raise me askew by handing me Orwell. She raised me literate in the world. Today’s children deserve the same.
Sharon Kay Cochran pastors three United Methodist congregations in Watonga, Canton & Fay Oklahoma and writes on faith, life, and education.