Quote:
Originally Posted by Fbone
Also, depending on the school all students have access to all the books in the library. So what may be appropriate for 14 years olds may not be for 6 year olds.
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I really think that the librarians (of whom I would have expected much more) are being borderline dishonest (and certainly disingenuous) with their promotion of banned book week. And I'm strongly opposed to banning books; and very happen we've moved beyond the days when Henry Miller's books were seized at the border and not permitted to be imported (although they were legal in France); or when Lolita was banned in France (but permitted in the US). [Yeah, I don't follow that either]. And of course the fatwa against Salman Rusdie was another horrible example of a de facto attempt to ban books.
However, when you follow up on banned books week, it turns out that they are not really talking about banned books, and they're not encouraging people to read Henry Miller or Nabokov or Solzhenitsn. What they're really talking about is books that have been "challenged" - meaning (in every case I know of) that a parent has followed some sort of administrative procedure to attempt to get a book removed from a school library on the basis that it's inappropriate for their children. Pretty much never on grounds that I would support.
There are at least two levels of deception going on. The first is defining a book as "banned" if it is removed from a school library somewhere - leading to the ludicrous result that "Harry Potter," AFAIK the best selling book series in the US, is listed as "banned." That's just dishonest. Removing a book from one school library is not "banning" the book, particularly when it is displayed prominently for sale in pretty much every book store, grocery, or gas station that sells books.
The second issue, and to me the worst, is the conflation of "banned" with "challenged," particularly in the context of school libraries. While I don't think that any of the books on the most recent list I saw should be removed from school libraries, I think it is very important that parents have the right to challenge what is going on at their school. If my kid attended a middle school library that had a copy of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" or "The Turner Diaries," I would be the first one to request that those books be removed. The freedom to challenge acts our government takes is *just as important* as the first amendment, and stigmatizing people who have the temerity to question the judgment of a school librarian is not a good thing at all.