Genuinely, one of the measures that's stopped book banning the most when districts implement it, is having the would-be banners fill out a form that demonstrates if they've read the book or not. Like where they have to summarize the plot and characters and do a mini book report and give a review. It stops them in their tracks. This is why in my high school, every time someone wanted to ban a book it ended up going nowhere. There was one where a conservative student wanted to ban the manga "Legal Drug" for having a marijuana leaf on the cover, then got the form that required them to actually read and either balked, or read it and realized it was not pro-drug at all. (The other one that reduces book bans even further is "requiring the would-be banner to be affiliated with this actual school in some way, either by being a student, faculty/staff or a parent of a child at the school" because the vast majority of bans are "activists" with no affiliation with the school who just travel around trying to do this in districts all over the U.S. IIRC a few years ago someone crunched the numbers and just 51 parents were responsible for all the book bans that year nationally. 51! In a country with 50 states, with over 300 million people total!)
I was looking back at this and saw people pointing out that this is harder to do now because of AI and also organized groups like Moms for Liberty know about and try to get around this shit… and ok, sure, I was in high school in the 2000s (if the book in contention being a CLAMP manga didn’t give that away!) and in a place where it was genuinely uncommon for school districts to put up any resistance to the censors. (My elementary school in another district just rolled right the fuck over when the members of one specific ultra-conservative church — considered extreme even by the other Christian fundies, and in a very religiously diverse district — came in demanding they ban Harry Potter.) The environment around all of this is different. Still, I would say as a college professor that there are plenty of ways to get around using AI and other varieties of cheating. As others have said, do it in person. Jumping the requirement on them without informing them ahead of time is good too. And probably most important is having the school board or whomever is questioning them read the book, too. Pretty much any book has things that anyone who has actually read it will know and recall, but that won’t be considered significant enough to be caught by an online summary or an AI, that you can question people on to find them out; I do this with my students when I assign books or movies all the time. It sucks to make school board members do all this shit — and I can’t emphasize this enough, the “requiring challengers to be affiliated with the district” deters this more than anything (someone mentioned Maryland and they recently passed a law requiring that of any book or curriculum challenges; one recent prominent effort that got halted by that came from homeschooling parents in MoCo who wanted to control the curriculum of the schools they were choosing not to send their kids to. nope, assholes!!) But I think most people who genuinely care about education would agree it’s worth it to protect kids’ access to and quality of education from small-minded ideologues.
