The question of whether a book should be censored or not is a cultural issue, and as such rather than blanketing a particular book with pure censorship or pure acceptance, we should analyze it in relation to the culture that in which we are censoring. When I say that the reasons we censor are cultural, what I mean is that when we make a decision, as educators and a society to not allow children to read a certain book for one reason or another, it is a decision based on our cultural norms. We as the western civilized world in general, Americans more specifically, and North Carolinians in particular, do not want our children introduced to certain types of material for various reasons. We censor their access to materials that contain strong language, violence or sexual explicit scenes, all for good reasons as our culture sees them. On the other hand, we allow our children to view a great deal of material that other cultures may see as very inappropriate behavior. So when we are making decisions about which books are appropriate we must keep in mind the culture which we are addressing. To expect a culture that is very conservative by our standards to accept our personal point of view is quite close minded, how would we feel if a foreign culture allowed our children to be exposed to materials that we feel are out of bounds for children?
Now, an argument can be made that because it is impossible to cater to the wishes of every member of society, we should make decisions based democratically off the will of the most represented views in the overall culture. The problem with using this as the basis for censorship decisions is more pragmatic. Different regions of the country have different cultures. As such the cultural norms of a given school system can differ radically from another geographically distant school system. To deny this is intellectually dishonest. The interesting thing about this is that schools are funded largely on a state and local level. If we are teaching in a school system that has a different cultural view than our own, and the school system is supported through democratically collected taxes from within the communities, do the members of that community not have more of a right to decisions about censorship of a particular book than the teachers?
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i found the following quote from your blog interesting:
ReplyDelete"When I say that the reasons we censor are cultural, what I mean is that when we make a decision, as educators and a society to not allow children to read a certain book for one reason or another, it is a decision based on our cultural norms."
The first thing that came to my mind when I read this was,"When we instituted cultural norms and we forbid something-then kids (or anyone else, for that mattter) are more drawn to doing the forbidden thing. So, is it better to ban something and draw more attention to an undesirable thing, or should we let that something just sit quietly in the background and let all the hype play itself out?
I can remember Judy Bloom's book: Are You There God? It's me Margaret becoming a questioned book in the fifth grade. All of the girls wanted to read that book the instant the controversy was mentioned. And yes, I was part of the madness. I was extremely disappointed because I wanted the book to be racey and it was just about the normal issues a girl faces while she matures.
Thanks for the well thought out comment! You have a really good point about the lure of the forbidden, and I really had to think to flesh out my argument. In fact I agree that it is nearly an absolute. When you make a rule to stop children from having access to something, they will want it all the more. The thing is, keeping this in mind, how do we then make decisions about what they may and may not see? If we think of all literature as a line graph, with Dick and Jane on the left, and materials that are shockingly inappropriate on the right, when considering books for children all books should fall somewhere into the continuum. Once we find a spot on the scale where we say “You may read books this racy and no further”, the “lure of the forbidden” will set in. Children will want to have access to things just beyond the level we think appropriate. If we let them have access to the material, we are basically shifting our scale to the right, and the same process will start again. This could lead to a never ending slide toward allowing children to view things that everyone would consider inappropriate materials. To prevent this, at some arbitrary point we must say “here and no further”. Yes children will want to have access to more racy material, and it may be only slightly less appropriate, but we have to make the choice somewhere. What I am advocating in the original post, is using the cultural norms of the society that is paying for the education to decide where to put the line in the sand.
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