“freedom requires….factuality.” – bell hooks. Teaching Critical Thinking
“Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us." - Justice William O. Douglas
Information plays a central role in democracy. This week - National Library Week - we celebrate libraries for providing and preserving information for our communities, and for helping us get, share, keep, and use information to inform our actions and choices. These and related rights are at the heart of the Library Bill of Rights, first endorsed by the nation’s libraries in the 1930’s.
Freedom from censorship
Censorship takes many forms: words can be banned and their use bring reprisal; people exercising free speech can be fired, deported, arrested and imprisoned. Journalists can be denied access to news sites, or targeted and killed; bookstores are raided, books burned, and data destroyed. Out of fear people may censor themselves.
Democracy depends on people knowing what other people think and experience, learning from each other, engaging in debate, and discovering common ground. Free speech and a free press protect everyone’s rights to communicate and gather information and ideas.
Libraries support free speech and a free press by protecting communities from censorship - libraries assemble and provide access to a diversity of data, ideas, and opinions, and resist efforts to ban books from libraries.
Freedom to preserve history and data
“Exposing a nation’s citizens to the complex story of its past is…an essential prerequisite for civic compassion. Democracy requires a common shared reality, including a common understanding of the past.” (Jason Stanley, Erasing History, p. 183)
Non-democratic governments often engage in the selective erasure of perspectives, histories, and evidence, whether through the destruction of documents, or by requiring schools to omit certain perspectives and histories from educational courses and materials.
When a government erases information (shuts down websites, destroys or revises agency documents, suspends or destroys data programs), libraries, scholars, and other partners can conduct “data rescue” projects to ensure that data and documents don’t disappear, and that knowledge of complex histories and shared reality survive. Librarians, scientists and scholars archive and save data. See WPI’s Data rescue guide and read about what the Internet Archive is doing today.
Freedom to determine what is true
“…critical thinking is a profoundly democratic way of knowing.” bell hooks, Teaching Critical Thinking (187)
“…democracy has to be born anew in each generation, and education is its midwife.” – John Dewey
“When traditional sources of knowledge such as news media, public education and scientific expertise are discounted, fascists can create their own reality and get away with a lot.” Lorraine Berry, LA Times
Universities are committed to the idea that no one – and no government – has a monopoly on truth. The freedom to determine what is true is the fundamental work of universities, through a communal process of questioning and determining what is true, individually and as a community, based on evidence.
Teaching faculty and teaching librarians play a vital role in helping students learn the information skills that are essential to critical thinking, and to counteracting misinformation and disinformation. At WPI, research librarians have created a guide on fake news, disinformation, and how to critically evaluate sources of information.
This Library Week 2025, we invite you to exercise your democratic right to information!
- Test (and power up) your ability to determine what is true with this open access book, Web Literacy for Student Fact-Checkers
- “Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet. Read books.” – Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny (59)
- Read the Constitution & Bill of Rights
- Read books on censorship and propaganda
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Read the Library Bill of Rights:
