Freedom to Learn

Advancing America’s promise that everyone will enjoy the freedom to learn.

What’s at Stake

Truth is under attack, as oppressive political forces seek to stifle the teaching of history and promote false narratives about the country’s founding and the most recent presidential election.

What We’re Doing

People For the American Way is protecting the freedom to learn the truth by:

resisting book banning and censorship,
challenging efforts to restrict the teaching of truth about racism in our history and institutions,
supporting school board members and other public officials who are targets of political attacks for supporting the freedom to learn.

What We’ve Accomplished

Since our founding more than 40 years ago, we’ve been a leader in the fight against censorship and book banning. Recently, we’ve seen some outstanding accomplishments.

We launched a petition which gained more than 16,000 signatures in response to the College Board—the organization which administers the SAT and creates the curricula for Advanced Placement (AP) classes—watering down parts of its AP African American Studies course curriculum. The College Board eventually acknowledged its missteps and, following our petition delivery, reversed course on its planned cuts to the curriculum.
We launched a petition strongly urging children’s book publisher, Scholastic, to change its new policy of removing or segregating books at children’s book fairs, and, following intense public pressure from groups including People For the American Way, Scholastic reversed course and said it would not banish books about race, gender or sexuality to a separate section at school book fairs.