It is pearl clutching season again – hold on to those F bombs
This video debates banning, specifically the banning of Hold Still by Nina LaCour.
KCTV5 contacted Blue Springs School District officials about the Browns’ concern. The district said in an email that Hold Still “has been removed from the library and classrooms” pending a review by a group of teachers and instructional staff members.
The video is worth watching, and you can read the whole article here. Remember to SPEAK LOUDLY.
Concerned for my children? Don’t be.
“I congratulate them for doing what’s right and removing the two books,” said Scroggins, who didn’t attend the board meeting. “It’s unfortunate they chose to keep the other book.”
The other book Scroggins is referring too is Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson. If you remember a few months ago we were all a’flutter with the news that a man wanted to remove three books from the local school. Speak, Twenty Boy Summer (Sarah Ockler), and Slaughterhouse Five. Today it was revealed that Scroggins indeed won the battle and the latter two books were removed from curriculum and school libraries.
There seems to be an explosion of people who are concerned about the welfare of my children; and yours. Megan Cox Gourdon doesn’t feel children should read too darkly, Safe Libraries feels the ALA is too lax and Scroggins thinks date rape is too pornographic and sexual for kids to read. While I can appreciate your views, and your concerns I would just like to say: they are incredibly displaced worries and you don’t have to be concerned for what anyone reads outside your own family.
See we all have different morals, and 90% of the time my views are way more lax than even the average person. The only thing I expect from my children is that no matter what it is they consume they learn something from it, and if they have questions they ask them. My daughter is almost 8 and even though she has free reign to read/watch what she wants she is an excellent example of self censoring. She reads and watches only things she can handle. If it’s too scary or she can’t understand it she quickly moves on.
The question I have is simply this: why can you not trust your children? Do you deem them so immature or so sneaky that you have to ban everything that you deem inappropriate? Do your children have to be mini versions of you, why can they not have their own agenda and ideals?
Children are inquisitive by nature, that which you take away will become interesting if only for gaining the knowledge of what you deemed so incredibly startling and morally wrong that they be protected from it.
Censorship: My take
cen·sor·ship
–noun
1. the act or practice of censoring.
2. the office or power of a censor.
3. the time during which a censor holds office.
4. the inhibiting and distorting activity of the Freudian censor.
Censorship has lots of different definitions. To me it boils down to something pretty simple. The act of censoring materials, beliefs or media is a tyrant activity. To actively seek to destroy, remove or eradicate anything just because it doesn’t bode well with you and your beliefs is a selfish and cowardly way to handle things that you do not agree with.
I don’t like a lot of things. White chocolate for instance. I hate that stuff, and it’s not really chocolate anyway. Do I start a campaign to rid America or the world of this dastardly imposer? Absolutely not. Some people actually eat that garbage and enjoy it.
Now you may say what does chocolate have to do with books, books that have sex, drugs, and (gasp) gay protagonists? Nothing. However taking these materials out of libraries, out of the hands of people who are in no way connected to your life or beliefs weighs at the same ridiculousness as a proposed ban on white chocolate to me.
To take books such as, Twilight, Wintergirls, Crank, and Luv Ya Bunches out of the hands of teens because you don’t think any teen should read them is ridiculous. Are you the parent or guardian of every teen on the planet? Absolutely not.
Just because you do not agree with materials doesn’t inherently make the materials wrong. It makes it wrong to you and your family, not mine. You see I have a plan, my plan involves my children being able to read any material that they want. I want it ready and available for them anywhere they look. I want this because I trust my children.
I talk to them. We discuss things, we are a team. I trust them to make the right decisions, to be humanitarians, to tell me things that they read that made them think or that they need clarification on. I will encourage them to read outside of their comfort zones, to push the limits of their beliefs and have an open mind to any culture.
Through learning only are we free. If you want to live in a box that you have created for yourself that only includes x and y that is fine. Leave me and mine out of it.
What do you think reader? Do you have a plan for censorship in home?
I would like to thank Amy, Danielle, Gail, Susan, & Tasha for weighing in. Their pieces were fantastic. Go read them already.
Censorship Week: Tasha from Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and Books
Here is what Tasha from Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and Books has to say:
Read No Evil
A few weeks ago, Farley’s Bookshop Blog had a post titled “Most People Don’t Want to Read,” an essay by William Hastings. Hastings posited that people don’t want their ideas and world views to be challenged, so they either don’t read or read pablum that they know will reinforce their world view.
As a reader, especially someone who reads what Hastings would undoubtedly label “summer reading,” I found his thesis offensive. Who is he to decide what will and won’t challenge people’s world views, to decide what’s worth reading? Just the act of reading fiction is a submission of one’s viewpoint to that of someone else, at least for a time, and thus is an acknowledgement that experiences outside of one’s ken are valuable–even if they do in the end wind up reinforcing a personal viewpoint.
However, I do think the post is pertinent when talking about censorship.
As various anecdotes prove, the most virulent supporters of censoring books wouldn’t read the books they want to censor if they were last pieces of writing on the planet. They don’t want their world view challenged. They don’t want the books to tempt them or their friends and family. These people are obviously fringe elements, however, and rarely have a lasting impact.
The issue with most societies is there are things that the vast majority of people would object to off-hand without ever considering it. Sometimes these things make sense, like child prostitution or incest. But whether they make sense or not isn’t the point–the point is, if confronted with a taboo, most people don’t want to confront it, consider it, or read about it. It’s wrong, period.
But that’s where the role of genre comes in. Genre provides a structure to reinforce our favorite societal myths–romance and Westerns being two particularly appropriate examples. They are comforting reads of the sort which Hastings would undoubtedly deride. But subversive elements swish through the waters of that comforting, reinforcing framework. People of different classes and races mixing together, changing of genre roles, incest, and question of what is bad and what is good are all things that can be found in genre novels. No, they may not confront issues outright–but then if they did who would read them, or who would publish them?
So in a way, Hastings is right–people don’t want to read things that challenge them too much. Even the most liberal of human beings has a line; people should have lines. But the books he dismisses as an utter waste of brainpower are not. More people listen to a whisper than a shout, and a book someone enjoys is more likely to make an impact on them. In the end, Hastings’ manifesto is its own sort of censorship, reserving books for an educated intelligentsia who can afford to criticize many things from their ivory towers and ignore the fact that they have their own taboos.
But books aren’t just for smart people, or rich people. Books are for everyone.
So read–just read. And don’t let anyone ever tell you what you should and shouldn’t be reading.
Censorship Week: My Friend Amy
Here is what Amy from My Friend Amy has to say:
One of the things I most love about reading is that it is a low risk way to confront my prejudices. Often, going into a book, I have no idea that some of my ideas about life or people might be challenged. I might not realize that I’ll be asked to slip into the mind of someone very different from myself and feel the things they feel as they experience a variety of situations I may never experience. I really believe that reading fiction allows me to become a more sympathetic person.
This is one of the reasons I cannot tolerate the idea of censorship. Granted, I have always read what I wanted to read. It’s a freedom I do not take for granted, especially as I’m learning more and more about book banning. Censorship is a form of control that should not be tolerated in our society. Censorship is when one person or groups of people try to shape the information intake and thus the way another group of people thinks. This usually benefits a majority rules type mindset. This is particularly cruel, because books are often where we first discover we are truly not alone.
Are books a cause for fear? Well yes. Because reading by its very nature encourages thought, sympathy, empathy, imagination, and the changing of one’s mind. If you are seeking a world uniform in thought, a world that is grey, where injustice goes unnoticed, and everyone is exactly the same then books are the most terrifying objects there are. Books contain the the story of us, of all of us, humans working out our different situations through artistry, trying to make sense of the messy, holy, mystery of life. But no book is a simple object and no reading experience invites a uniform response. Each individual responds and reacts to what they find in the pages of a book in a way that is unique to them.
Living in this world is hard. There is no reason to make it harder by trying to control the way we think, by barring books that express a different worldview from ours from the shelves, by robbing ourselves of the chance to feel a little more human compassion for one another, to feel angry by injustice, to feel empowered to realize we are not alone. Can’t we put aside our fear and instead open our ears and start talking to one another instead?
