Jezebel.com has a post up today about a mother’s failed attempt at book banning in her child’s school library at Thiesen Middle School in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. She attempted to have the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series removed, as well as Get Well Soon by Julie Halpern, What My Mother Doesn’t Know and One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies, both by Sonya Sones.
I found it to be particularly interesting because I’m currently in an honors course on banned books. Just last week, we began discussion on Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Our preliminary discussion of the book included reference to its role in the Supreme Court case, Island Trees School District v. Pico. A teacher in the school district decided to teach Slaughterhouse-Five. One of the girls in his class told her mother that the book had some objectionable content, one thing led to another, and soon a janitor was made to burn copies of the book in the school furnace. The decision was challenged by many of the students, and a few of them (including Pico) took the school district to court. Ultimately, the United States Supreme Court ruled that “local school boards may not remove books from school library shelves simply because they dislike the ideas contained in those books and seek by their removal to ‘prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion.'”
Now, I’m no lawyer, but it seems like what this mother was doing was in direct violation of that ruling. What makes the whole thing even more confusing is that this parent decided that she should dictate what every one of her child’s classmates could check out from their school library despite the fact that the school has this helpful little system in place:
“The Fond du Lac School District offers a book screening process available through Alexandria library software. The feature allows parents/guardians to place restrictions on materials that their child can check out from school libraries. To utilize the feature, parents need to contact the library media specialist at their child’s school.
When a student checks out a book, library automation system alerts the media specialist or secretary if a parent/guardian has requested a restriction of materials.”
This just takes an element of book banning that I’ve always found to be baffling to the extreme. Why should one parent, or even a handful of parents, have the right to decide what every student in a single classroom or school, or even every person who walks into the public library, can read? Do they not trust their own children enough that they could simply say, “I know that you could check that book out from the library, but I’d rather you didn’t. You see, it has these things in it that I think are just a bit too mature for you,” and hope that the kid would comply? Do they not spend enough time with their kids or know them well enough that they’re aware of what they read? My mom always was. While her insistence on insuring that I wasn’t reading anything she thought inappropriate was a bit tiresome to me, I’m glad that she cared enough to develop a rapport about what I was reading. For the most part, she trusted me enough to make my own decisions in the end (though she did initially bar me from reading Harry Potter, which was unbearable), and I don’t think I ever read anything that had a lasting negative impact on me.
Which leads me to what I found most interesting about the Jezebel article. The author presented an aspect of book banning that I hadn’t fully considered before:
“If parents insist on thoroughly sanitizing the books their kids have access to, kids will probably respond by reading less, and by turning to media over which their parents have less control. And really, efforts to ban books from school libraries have come to seem almost depressingly quaint. I wish kids were sneaking into the library, of all places, to get their hands on edgy s**t that would freak their parents out. The reality is that kids can get shocking material much more easily on the Internet, and books are so uncool in comparison (with, I suppose, a few vampiric exceptions) that parents who think the printed word will destroy their children’s innocence are looking in the wrong place.”
Back in my pre-teen and teenage years (oh so long ago, you know), I wouldn’t say that I was really getting my hands on any “shocking material” on the Internet, and it was more difficult for me to be allowed to see a PG-13 film than it was for me to find a book that perhaps approached PG-13 territory. My response to the sanitization of all the other media that I took in was to turn to books, where I could perhaps get slightly edgier fare (by my standards and experience back then, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials series was the edgiest thing I’d ever read). But I can see where kids today might have the opposite reaction. Their parents see a copy of The Catcher in the Rye and something clicks in their brain and they remember all the cursing in it, so they throw a fit. The kid responds by shelving the book and going to his bedroom, getting online and watching old episodes of South Park, while his parents are none the wiser. If he can get that stuff on the Internet – stuff that makes Holden Caulfield’s sailor’s mouth seem tame in comparison – then why would he even bother with books?
Parents need to respect the intelligence of their children. If they see that their kid is one of the special ones who has developed a love of reading, then they should ignite it, not put it out. Even if they feel the need to pluck certain books out of the innocent hands of their children (I’ll admit that a 12-year old probably doesn’t need to be reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover, though I’d love to meet the 12-year old who tries), they should provide a suitable alternative. Those parents who go one step further and attempt to put out that fire in kids who are not their own are something I can’t comprehend. “Monsters” might be a good term. I was oddly touched by the plea one student at Thiesen Middle School gave to the school board in defense of One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies. “It’s really what happens in school, making fun of and problems and issues. It’s really what happens in school, it’s life.” It’s so sincere, and this little 13-year old girl has clearly connected with this book on a personal level. That’s the gateway to being a life-long reader. Clearly this book provided her with some sort of mirror of her own school experience, and it seems like she needed it. Hopefully, if her impassioned (for a 13-year old) defense of the book is any indicator, this incident will only make this young lady feel an even deeper connection with literature.
Finally, it all makes me wonder how many of these parents actually read the books that they complain about. In the Island Trees School District case, one of the parents who had a hand in the book banning later read Slaughterhouse-Five and retracted their previous opinion on its supposed “objectionable content.” It seems that if more people did this before crying wolf, we’d probably have fewer and fewer cases of attempted book banning.
7 comments
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February 23, 2010 at 9:34 PM
vonsamuel
Censorship always sickens me. Good post.
February 23, 2010 at 9:47 PM
leeraloo
Thanks. And me too. Not to say that parents shouldn’t be able to say their kids shouldn’t be allowed to read something, but there’s a way to determine that your kids aren’t reading things you don’t want them to without crossing the line into censorship for everyone. It also helps if you make sure you know what you’re talking about first.
February 25, 2010 at 3:43 AM
Copper
To be honest, book bannings confuse me more than anything else. I mean, what better way to draw attention to a taboo book than by calling for a public banning? And to believe that most 13 year old children will meekly accept that they’re not allowed to read a book and move on straddles the line between ignorant parenting and bad parenting. I wonder if these parents put a large neon sign over everything they don’t want their children to do. “You know the cigarettes I keep in the top dresser drawer, hidden in the folds of the yellow turtleneck? You are to never touch those, ever!”
Plus, the internet point is a good one. /b/, which most parents don’t even know about, has content about a thousand times worse than any book, and all within super-easy access to children of all ages.
February 25, 2010 at 4:52 AM
leeraloo
Yeah, especially in our society today, where we can get ahold of almost anything if we really want it, it really doesn’t make sense at all. However, one could argue that the kind of parents who would call for a book to be banned from a school or classroom or public library tend to be the kinds of parents who probably don’t let their kids out of their sight long enough to allow them to get the book (or any other sort of objectionable content) any other way. And although I think it flirts with idiocy to ban your kid from reading books, I’ll admit that there are probably some books that kids who have been raised in fairly conservative households would be shocked and maybe changed by, and therefore I can see why parents would maybe want to keep said books away from their children. But to go so far as trying to get the book banned for EVERYONE in the class/school/town, etc., is just rude. That’s like if I was watching an R-rated film and my neighbor came over and stole my DVD player because they didn’t like the content of the film. That’s when book banning gets absolutely ridiculous. Actually, helping your kids pick books to read that you deem acceptable is fine, but book banning is always ridiculous.
February 25, 2010 at 3:36 PM
Copper
I don’t know (and this might just be the childlessness talking) but I’d think responsible parenting means exposing your children to all types of ideas in controlled environment, and I can’t think of a more controlled environment to fully explore ideas and themes, both good and bad, than a book. I’d much rather my kid were shocked or changed by by something they read in a book, where I know what’s going on and can talk to my children about how they interpreted things and help them come to terms with it, than by other, unpredictable means. I mean, yeah, I can see some points where book bannings might be appropriate, like if the parent would rather have a talk about drugs before their children reads Trainspotting, but I’m hard pressed to come up with many examples of that.
Of course, talking to your children and exploring the ideas with them as they get exposed to it would require a hefty dose of responsible parenting, which, God forbid anyone do that anymore. It’s much easier to act as society’s moral guardian and preach on what books everyone should and should not read, rather than focusing on raising your own child(ren).
February 25, 2010 at 5:54 PM
leeraloo
Well, for me it was because of our religion. My mom always said that I could read books like “Harry Potter” that had themes that were “in opposition” of our faith, but why take the chance when I could read something more positive? She never really banned me from reading something we were assigned in class, but if I was given the option of reading a book in class or choosing another book (like when we read “Catcher in the Rye” in 10th grade), we would talk it over first. The ultimate decision was left up to me. I personally would rather use more “adult” books as a learning and discussing experience between me and my (imaginary) kids, but I can’t really fault other parents for wanting to be careful of what their child ingests. My mom was very cautious about such things, and I don’t feel like I’m any worse for it. But my mom usually took the time to read the book in question so that she’d know exactly what was going on, and that’s something I don’t see a lot of in these book banning cases (or at least I assume that it’s not going on). Basically, it’s a gray area most of the time, but what I can say is inexcusable is trying to get the book banned for an entire group of people when you’re really just concerned about your own kid.
March 11, 2010 at 5:21 AM
Mike McCormack
PLEASE HELP US. The University of Miami banned the magazine we created, and now they are threatening us with charges, fines, and academic consequences if we continue to distribute on campus; and no its not porn… its back\slash, a user generated college lifestyle magazine founded by UM students and circulated for free at 17 schools in FL. I personally withdrew from UM in response to the ban.
The Miami New Times condemns The U’s decision, read more: http://backslashonline.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=328:student-drops-out-after-magazine-banned&Itemid=41
If you can help us stand up against this powerful institution, please contact Mike @ 850.723.6338.