Here is my final installment of my Banned Books Week
posting. This post is excerpted from a section of my Master’s thesis on
censorship in school libraries from more than twenty years ago. My opinion has
not changed. Some content has been edited and updated, but not censored.
Censorship in schools did not begin with Catcher in the
Rye. In The Republic, Plato proposed to banish poets and dramatists
for the making the Gods look less than God-like. He wrote that fiction had a
band moral influence on the young. This ideology laid the groundwork for today’s
justification for removing books from school libraries..
During the nineteenth century, Anthony Comstock, a zealous fundamentalist,
penned a book entitled Traps for the Young, noting that light
literature, newspapers and artistic works, including literature, were traps. He
believed anyone who read “dime novels,” today’s equivalent to Young Adult, was
doomed to a life of degradation and Hell.
Censors often have not read the materials which they challenge,
or have only read isolated passages out of context. An example of a ludicrous dispute
is the often challenged Steinbeck novel The Red Pony. In the 1980’s,
the Vernon-Verona school District labeled the book as “a filthy and trashy sex
novel.” If the challengers had bothered to read the book, they would learn this
particular work by Steinbeck is a clean-cut tale of a boy and his horse. Because
Steinbeck, who also authored East of Eden and The Grapes of Wrath
wrote The Red Pony the assumption is made that this, too contained questionable
materials, yet this book continues to appear on banned book lists.
Censors believe book have behavioral consequences leading to
premarital sex, violence, and questioning authority. The two most often censored aspects of books
are language and sex, the fear being that teenagers will emulate behavior of
the characters in the book such as Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye.
Teens hear this language every day in the hallways at school, or if they have
jobs, out in the real world.
These same censors do not give students enough credit for
their ability to discern when language is appropriate or not. Students know
literature and real life are different. It doesn’t mean the words themselves should
be emulated, and students who use an F-bomb or other curse word in class are
usually punished, but colorful vocabulary is a part of life. If authors sanitized
their dialogue by substituting expletives with phrases like “Oh, fudge!,” or “Drat
and Sugar” they lose credibility with
their readers. Young adult author Robin
Brancato states, “…when I employ ‘bad language’ as you call it, and references
to sex, it is not because I think these are needed to sell books or hold the
reader’s interest, but because the body functions and the names for them, both
polite and impolite, are parts of life, and I am interested in portraying life
as it really is.”
Almost no literature is without sex. The Bible, beginning
with Adam and Eve, is loaded with sex and sexual references, thus making it
also a contested book in many libraries.
A distinction must be made between pornography and
literature. Pornography is a Latin term meaning ‘writing about prostitution.’ In
modern times, pornography has devolved into sub-literature comprising endless repetition,
stilted dialogue and is most often anonymously written. Unlike literature, pornography’s
intent is not to evoke realistic emotion or feeling; it is merely designed to titillate.
In the not too distant past librarians themselves were the
primary censors. In early volumes of the American Library Journal, censorship
was encourages through articles written about the dangers of certain types of
books, particularly fiction. It was not until the Library Bill of Rights was
adopted in 1939 that a clear cut policy was adopted.
The most ironic challenge is Fahrenheit 451, a book about
book burning books. Written in the early Fifties about a futuristic world (which
eerily resembles us today with our ear buds and wall sized TVs), fireman are
dispatched to homes where the owners are known to have books, in effect, destroying
all intellectual knowledge.
The purpose of education is to not only communicate factual
information, but to teach young people to be critical thinkers who can devise
their own value systems. Censorship undermines the students’ ability to
discriminate.
Al school libraries have criteria for selection of new materials.
Some might argue that selection is a form of censorship, yet school libraries
are constrained by curricular needs and tight budgets. It becomes a problem
when librarians either enforce their own narrow fields of interest, or when community
or administrators question materials available through the library/media
center. A library media specialist’s responsibility is not to impose his or her
viewpoints on patrons. A colleague once told she weeded the Negro Almanac
because the term ‘negro’ offended her. Granted the title is dated, and if one
has the budget to replace this with a suitable, updated source, then go for it.
But I will defend keeping a book like this on the shelf for the information and
historical perspective it contains. Our culture likes to pretend the Unites
States does not have an ugly past.
There are no easy answers for the question of censorship. I consider
myself open minded, but, I too have limits. I will not intentionally stock an
item on my shelves which encourages or instructs a students on how to kill himself.
Nor will I add blatantly graphic works
such as Madonna’s Sex book or Fifty Shades of Gray. However, there are materials in my library
which offend my intellect: the schlocky, badly written vampire romances or the
ever popular, badly written child abuse memoir, The Lost Boy. Kids love
them, and it’s not my place to judge what students choose to read. My goal is
that students read, period. Once the seeds for story are planted, perhaps kids
will gravitate towards higher quality literature. In any case, they will have
the freedom of choice.
