Brian C. Poole, click
here to update your pages on AuthorsDen.
Blogs by Brian C. Poole
Banned Books Week 2014 9/24/2014 6:11:14 AM
[This post originally appeared on thunderalleybcp.com]
Here we are in the middle of Banned Books Week 2014.
This annual ALA-sponsored event is crucial to raising awareness about censorship. It highlights the ALA’s ongoing efforts to promote literary freedom.
As a writer, lawyer and First Amendment enthusiast, the concept of banning books always makes my blood run cold. Opinions differ on the merits of any particular book. But the freedom to make those choices for yourself is at the heart of the First Amendment. Without a free and open exchange of ideas, society stagnates. When any group decrees what is and is not acceptable reading material for the community at large, we lose something vital and important.
I’m not advocating forcing books on people who don’t want them. Indeed, the freedom to read a book includes the freedom not to read it. There are many books I personally choose to avoid for any number of reasons.
The problem with book banning is that one family or small group of families decides that because they would prefer their children not be exposed to a certain work of literature, that no one’s children should have access to it. Balancing community access against personal choice can be tricky. Compromises are inevitable and necessary. But wholesale embargoes on books never make sense.
Some parents object to school curriculums exposing their children to difficult or provocative topics. Perhaps they find certain sexual content objectionable. They might object to religious or political views presented. They might find certain passages excessively crude.
Those may be valid reasons why a parent may not want their child to read a given book. But let’s be honest: sealing your child in a hermetic bubble and keeping anything you find challenging or disturbing out of their hands isn’t a strategy for raising a well-adjusted child equipped with the skills to deal with difficulties. Inoculating any person against views or values they don’t share is an exercise in intellectual stagnation. How can you defend your own positions if you’re never exposed to their opposites?
And if your child is compelled to read a book of which you disapprove because it’s part of a school curriculum, isn’t it then your job as a parent to discuss with your child the parts of the book with which you take issue? It’s a parent’s job to teach their child values. Expecting the rest of the world to withhold any material of which you disapprove isn’t realistic. When a child enters college or the work force, those ideas or values or positions will be there, confronting them. Turning out a generation that’s unable to cope with having their views challenged does no one any good.
You don’t have to allow your child to read Harry Potter or Captain Underpants. Insisting that no children in your child’s school should be able to borrow them from the school library, if their parents allow it, is ludicrous. It’s not the world’ responsibility to enforce your choices.
The First Amendment embodies the most important concepts in American society. The freedoms enshrined therein are critical to producing a thoughtful, engaged population. Those freedoms face assault in any number of ways. It’s not a “conservative vs. liberal” issue, either. Across the political spectrum, there are assaults on the intellectual liberties that the First Amendment wisely enshrines as sacred. Freedom is only meaningful if everyone has it. Even if you disagree with how someone else chooses to use his or her freedom.
Looking at some of the books that Banned Books Week highlights as frequent targets of challenges, there is a wide mix of titles. Objections to the books span a spectrum of opinions. There are some books of clear quality and others of dubious origin. There are some that I wouldn’t want a child I was raising to read. There are others I couldn’t fathom them not experiencing. That’s a subjective formulation.
And let’s be clear: no school is going to be assigning Fifty Shades of Grey to your high schooler. Objections to that book’s content may resonate for many. But that doesn’t mean that a library shouldn’t house a copy. Each family has the responsibility to instill and foster its values in its children. Obliterating a book that doesn’t meet those values is not a substitute for that hard work.
I’ve read many of the books on the “frequently banned” list. Some I’ve read for pleasure. Others were assigned to me, in college, high school or junior high. Some I liked; others, not so much. Some I would recommend; others I’d suggest readers cross the street to avoid. That’s my experience.
Because of the First Amendment, I was allowed the freedom to have that experience.
Banned Books Week reminds us how important that freedom is.
