Last
week was Banned Books Week, an annual celebration of books that are often
prohibited by schools for various reasons.
Books might be banned for profanity, sexuality, inaccuracy, religious
viewpoints, violence, and really any other reason that persons in authority
might come up with. The idea is that
these books are inappropriate for young readers.
This
idea has always seemed ridiculous to me.
First of all, how can we define “inappropriate”? The very word summons up the idea of propriety, which wears a connotation of a
stiff, narrow-minded, and boring way to live one’s life. (I can’t hear that word without remembering
Barbara Streisand’s character smugly reciting its definition on an escalator in
the movie What’s Up, Doc, which I
highly recommend and would probably be banned by the persons in authority I
cite above.) The problem with propriety
is that life is not proper or appropriate. Our world is ugly and dirty and insane and
sexual and profane. Personally, I think
it’s a good idea to prepare young people for that sooner rather than
later. All that muck will find them
eventually, and if they have at least some idea what it’s like, they’ll be able
to cope with it better.
Second
of all, having been a teenager, I can tell you that forbidding something is the
best way to be sure that they seek it out.
Tell a teenager that they can’t read something and they will immediately
wonder why, and try to find out. My
first trashy romance was a dreadfully written time-travel story with cardboard
characters (with perfect physiques, of course), full of purple prose and yes,
lots and lots of sex. I thought it was
the greatest thing ever, partly because I learned a lot from it, but mostly because my mother would have disapproved of my
reading it. (Of course, knowing my
mother much better now than I did when I was fifteen, I know she would probably
have been very amused to know I’d read that particular book and would have made
a few recommendations for better options.)
Thirdly,
the whole point of education (or at least, what the point of education should
be) is to teach people to think for themselves.
Ragini Bhuyan, writing about a contested censorship in India, said it
very well when he said, “The central premise of [the censors’] argument is that
a student exposed to alternate ways of thinking will necessarily adopt them,
instead of doing what is actually expected of students, which is to evaluate
the information you are presented with.”
Parents worry that students who read about violence will become violent,
students who read about profanity will begin to speak that profanity, and
students who read about homosexuality will become homosexual (the ensuing
question “what the hell is wrong with that?” is a post for another day). But more often, a student reading about
horrible, ugly things in a book will learn from that that these things are horrible and ugly and should be
avoided. A student reading about
profanity and homosexuality will have more information about these things with
which to make their own opinions about these issues.
The
point, to me, is that if we weren’t teaching our students to absorb opinions
into themselves and vomit them out again at a later point—if we taught them
instead to think for themselves—we wouldn’t have to worry about them reading
anything.
