In our digital world, a plethora of information is available at the tips of our fingers. Almost anything you could want is just a few clicks away. Now I want you to imagine the world of information available to you – the barrage of webpages and videos – and then to imagine someone taking that away from you, barring your access to knowledge. Something in you is probably averse to this idea, and with good reason. There is a strong ideal that likely rises in you: free speech. These two little words make up one of the most fundamental values in the United States. And we don’t want to lose that.
But now I want you to imagine a child – maybe it’s a sibling or a niece or nephew, maybe it’s a kid you know from church or the child of a family friend. Whomever you have in mind, I want you to picture them going to school, a space for learning and formation, and being exposed to sexual content, vulgar language and violence. That doesn’t seem right, either.
We live in a world where book bans (and attempted book bans) are making headlines. The push for censorship is concerning large portions of the population. While we should by no means instate mass book bans that prevent certain books from even being read in the U.S., perhaps it is not so anti-democratic to consider filtering what our children are reading in school. Children are now already being forced to grow up too fast. Do we really want to accelerate that process even more?
There have been countless cases in recent years of students and their parents complaining to schools over content that their children stumbled upon in the school library. In most cases, these are overtly sexual scenes or innuendos that they do not believe their child should be exposed to at such a young age. Most of the subtler elements will go over their heads, but for the more explicit content, perhaps we should reconsider what we are putting into developing young minds. Once students get to middle school and high school, they are more aware of what they are reading, and adult content like this will have a stronger effect on them, even if it isn’t obvious right away.
However, this is not to say that we should completely shelter our children or shield them from reality. Especially once they reach high school, we should be challenging them to wrestle with complex ideas and walking them through that. Reading adult ideas is not bad for them. In fact, quite the opposite. It stretches the mind and is an exercise in understanding and empathy. Children’s literature only has so much breadth of material that it can cover before delving into heavier subjects. But fiction in the adult realm has the opportunity to deal with weightier topics and expose them to new worldviews.
But sticking books with inappropriate content in them onto the shelves of a school library does not serve this goal. If they truly want to read these things they can find them in other places. But the purpose of school is to teach and to nurture. This does neither. Or if it does teach them something, it is likely not what we want them to be taking away from their education.
The difference is that with something like war, we are teaching them about history; it is educational. A random sex scene in the middle of a novel does not serve any educational purpose – or at least not the type of education that the school system is tasked with. Everything is fair game, as long as it is there for a reason – as long as we are keeping education at the heart of our choices in school library literature.
Photo courtesy of Med Page Today.
