Failure in Censorship, False Virtue, and Lived Experience

 

The thing with banning books is that at the end of the day, it just doesn’t work. }Kids are crafty, they find ways to get into things that they “shouldn’t”, and banning the reading of books in a controlled, educational environment, only stands to let them play detective and find things they actually shouldn’t be looking at in an uncontrolled environment. Mullally writes that parents and boards who promote the banning of books primarily operate under the objective of “protect[ing] the children in our schools from… moral danger” (Mullally, 2). The issue with that idea, however noble, is that the act of banning books with that goal in mind is inherently counterintuitive. 

        Books are often banned due to being deemed “emotionally inappropriate” (Ringel, 4). But, the act of shielding children from the realities of the world (like the fact that racism and gay people are real, spooky!) is what’s actually emotionally inappropriate. Preventing children from reading about topics they will inevitably be exposed to isn’t protecting them at all. It either pushes them to access those same topics in dangerous ways (such as my foray into strange PDF files on the internet, as mentioned in Monday’s class), or leads to them being outright blindsided when they come across those topics in the physical world. If you’re not preparing a student for what lies beyond a book, you’re stunting them. 

Furthermore on the subject of appropriateness, what about the very real situations in which people experience the same themes parents are trying to shut out? Why is reading about racism seen as “too much” for a student in middle school, when I was told that the racism I experienced at the hands of my teachers and peers at that age was perfectly acceptable? Catholic school boards can determine that reading about characters who experience sexual assault is out of the question, but turn around and protect church elders who perpetuate the same abuse. Why are these things only inappropriate in written form?

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