This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, November 17th,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown.

Challenges to the inclusion of certain books in school libraries have hit a fever pitch, so it's worth getting a better sense

of what's in and notably what's not in many public school libraries.

Cato's Neil McCluskey details his research.

We should stipulate this up front.

School libraries are finite in a sense.

That is, they have four walls and a limited amount of shelf space and that necessarily means that some

human or set of humans will make decisions about what goes into that library and what doesn't.

Absolutely correct. So we have been having a lot of battles recently,

although you can go back as far as back as public schools and books to find battles over what books

are in libraries you're taught in class but we've been having a lot more of them

in the last two or three years and there is a fundamental reality which is that you can only put so many books on shelves.

You can only have so much physical space in the library.

Now of course we have more access to electronic books, but

there's also limited budgets. You can only spend so much money on books. That means that somebody has to decide which books go into public

school libraries and which ones don't. And it turns out that when you have people choosing what to read and what not to read,

they may have biases. They may, it may be librarians have biases. There could be school boards have

biases. It could be lots of people. But the idea of public schooling libraries, at least the

idealized notion, is that they deliver or make accessible

all viewpoints so that anybody and student who's interested in something can just go there

and find everything that they could, that's possibly been written on a subject from all different perspectives.

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