This issue of Education Forum tackles book banning and censorship not as an abstract debate, but as a lived reality with profound implications for public education, equity, and democracy. As editor, I see this edition as a warning about what we stand to lose and an invitation to defend our libraries and classrooms where critical thinking is cultivated.

I was born in the late seventies, in Scarborough, Ontario, at a time when access to libraries was not a political statement, it was a given. My earliest memories of reading are not tied to a classroom or an assignment, but to anticipation. To the low rumble of the Albert Campbell mobile library pulling into my neighbourhood. To the moment the doors opened, and the space transformed into something sacred. Shelves upon shelves of possibility.

I remember pulling a book from the shelf and flipping to the back, where a small white card was tucked neatly into a pocket. I would print my name carefully in pencil, joining a quiet record of others who had been there before me. That simple act of choosing a book, signing it out, carrying it home, felt like permission. Not just to read, but to belong.

Inside that mobile library, I had free reign. There were no warnings attached to stories. There were no labels that told me which narratives were appropriate for me to encounter, and which were not. I wandered between authors, poets, and creatives, pulling books down simply because they spoke to me. I was a Black girl in Scarborough discovering that the world was vast, contradictory, imaginative, and unfinished. I was allowed to question it.

As I grew older, libraries evolved alongside me. The mobile libraries were phased out and were replaced by teen hubs and reference libraries that reflected the cultural moment. TV monitors playing Much Music, rows of computers, and sections upon sections categorized by every kind of adventure I could imagine. Those spaces were not sterile. They were alive. They encouraged curiosity, critique, and community. Libraries did not just house information, they nurtured my critical consciousness.

This topic is deeply personal to me. The person I became as a reader, a writer, and a critical thinker, was shaped by unguarded access to stories and ideas. The libraries of my childhood did not ask me to justify my curiosity or defend my right to read. They simply opened their doors.

As I step into this editorial role, I do so with a clear sense of responsibility to honour the spaces that shaped me and to raise the alarm when those spaces, and the freedoms they represent, are under threat.

Book censorships are often framed as protective measures about shielding children from harm. But history tells us something else. When books are banned, it is rarely because they are dangerous in the way weapons are dangerous. They are dangerous because they provoke thought. They are viewed as dangerous because they tell stories that challenge dominant narratives. They are viewed as dangerous because they centre identities, histories, and lived experiences that have long been marginalized or erased.

Storytelling through the written word has shaped civilizations. It has preserved histories. It has fueled revolutions of thought and culture. Playwrights, poets, novelists, and essayists are artists who have always been society’s mirror and its conscience. To censor text is to attack an art form. To politicize whose stories are allowed is to declare that some lives are more worthy of reflection than others.

Text is art.

Like any art form, it invites interpretation. It demands engagement. It asks the reader not simply to consume, but to respond, to agree, to resist, to rethink. When we censor books, we do not simply remove paper from shelves. We interrupt the development of critical thinking skills. We undermine the ability of young people to analyze power, question systems, and understand perspectives beyond their own. I worry about a future where my grandchildren encounter reading primarily through filters, algorithmic or ideological, that decide what is appropriate for them to know. Where curiosity is constrained by political agendas. Where identity itself becomes grounds for exclusion.

Critical consciousness is developed through exposure to contradiction, to injustice, to joy, to rage, and to imagination. Libraries allowed me to encounter stories of people who looked like me and people who did not. They taught me that history is contested, that truth is layered, and that learning requires courage.

I am who I am because I was allowed to read freely. Libraries were havens not battlegrounds. My hope is that we collectively choose to protect that legacy not only for our students today, but for the generations to come who deserve a future where books remain doors, not weapons.