Bookless day by Shanna Shepard

On the International Day of Education, the calendar asks us to celebrate classrooms, teachers, and the fragile miracle of attention. In America, however, the holiday now arrives like a sympathy card delivered to a demolished house. The Trump administration having almost eradicated the Department of Education and waged open war on inconvenient books, insists that learning is thriving, just not in any form that requires paper, doubt or a trained adult in the room.

This is not the first time a government has tried to remodel reality by reorganizing its libraries but it may be the first time it has done so while selling the wreckage as “freedom.” Freedom, in this telling, is a child alone with a screen, scrolling through patriotic bullet points, liberated from the burden of context. A teacher becomes a “facilitator,” a librarian a “gatekeeper,” and a novel a suspicious object that might teach empathy, which is apparently the gateway drug to dissent.

The new educational philosophy is admirably simple. Children do not need to know how to think, only what to repeat. History is trimmed into a motivational poster, science into a set of comforting slogans, literature into a police lineup from which certain characters have been quietly removed. The past becomes a shopping mall directory: everything controversial is rerouted to the parking lot, and the present is encouraged to admire its own reflection in the glass.

Supporters of this arrangement argue that the private market will fix what public institutions once attempted. Education, they say, is a product, like toothpaste or bottled water, and should be subject to consumer choice. If you dislike a book, simply do not buy it. If your child dislikes complexity, provide something smoother, sweeter, and easier to swallow. The invisible hand, we are told, will gently guide young minds away from troublesome questions and toward profitable certainty.

What the hand cannot do is teach patience, or curiosity, or the muscular skill of changing one’s mind. Those are inefficient habits, poorly suited to a politics that prefers loyalty to literacy. A society that treats books as contraband will eventually learn to speak only in slogans, and then, forgetting how metaphors work, will take its own propaganda literally, as children take fairy tales, except with fewer dragons and more flags.

International days are sentimental inventions, like greeting cards for abstract nouns. Yet they persist because someone, somewhere, is still trying to do the job. A teacher in a windowless classroom, a librarian with a stamp pad and a tired smile, a student discovering that a sentence can rearrange the furniture of the mind. These are small acts of resistance, easily overlooked by people who measure success in polling numbers and quarterly returns.

It is tempting to treat the current moment as a temporary fever, a strange chapter that future students will skim with relief. But students require schools in order to become students, and history requires witnesses who can read. When a government decides that ignorance is safer than knowledge, it is not merely economizing. It is rehearsing a quieter kind of censorship, the sort that does not burn books but makes them impossible to find.

So we celebrate the International Day of Education the way one celebrates a lighthouse after the harbour has been mined: with gratitude, with anxiety, and with the uneasy knowledge that light is considered a provocation by those who profit from the dark. The banned book and the dismantled classroom share a modest ambition. They want to make a citizen who can finish a paragraph, notice a lie, and imagine a life larger than the one he has been assigned.

That ambition is now described as dangerous. On this holiday, the safest response is to read anyway, to pass a story hand to hand like contraband bread, to teach a child that questions are not crimes. Empires rarely collapse from too much education. They collapse when the educated notice what has been done to them.

A nation that confuses obedience with learning will eventually graduate into silence, a ceremony without speeches, a future without footnotes. The diploma will be a mirror, reflecting only what authority wishes to see. Until then, teachers will keep smuggling verbs into the curriculum, librarians will practice the radical act of remembering, and students will continue the oldest experiment in democracy, thinking for themselves. It is a small rebellion, quiet as turning a page, loud as any vote, and stubborn enough to outlast the men who believe that erasers are stronger than pencils. Education does not need their permission. It has survived bonfires, borders, and bureaucrats, and it will survive this season of proud illiteracy, carrying its quiet arguments into whatever classrooms remain, even if they are only tables, laps, and borrowed light. Books travel well in pockets and in memory.