by Emily Mosier
George Orwell wrote: “If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.”
Censorship is not a new issue. But it has recently become a pressing topic in politics this year.
The news covers incidents where parents find truly pornographic or hateful material on library shelves, which of course should be removed; however, we should not use these types of incidents to set a dangerous precedent.
According to the Washington Post’s 2022 reporting, overwhelmingly, the books banned in public schools are censored because they deal with topics of racial identity, racism, Black history, sexuality and gender and books with LGBTQ+ characters.
It disturbs me that public schools, governmentally funded, want to ban books for having diverse characters or tackling real world issues and topics. Censorship, on either side of the political aisle, is agenda setting. Why can’t students have access to multiple points of view?
I would like to remind the reader of books that have been banned in recent history.
One of my favorite books, “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison has been banned (and it is a riveting and important novel that I think every teenager should read — written by the first Black woman to win a Nobel prize). You also have beloved, historical classics such as “Huckleberry Finn,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” Orwell’s “1984” (a book that is anti-communism), and some schools (i.e., in Keller, Texas, according to NBC in 2022) have even considered removing The Holy Bible and Anne Frank’s diary from library shelves.
While I absolutely believe that parents should have a say in what is taught in the curriculum, I will never be comfortable will the idea of students being censored in a library – a place where they should be able to choose for themselves what they want to read as a part of their private, independent studies. It would be wrong to take away a young person’s ability to teach themselves.
One might say they simply want to ban books from a school library, and students would still be free to check books out of a public library. I generally hate to make blatant and accusatory statements, but book banning is inherently classist. This dramatically widens the academic divide we already see between lower and upper-class students. Not every student lives in a household with a car, with a parent who can drive, with internet access. It denies low-income students, in the prime of their academic development, the ability to discover the same literature and philosophy as their peers.
One might say that ideas in books could damage what young people see as morally right or wrong. It is absurd, however, to blame the downfall of morality on books. The internet, pop culture, movies, home environments, and several other factors all contribute to the complex development of morality in adolescents.
Also, who gets to decide which ethical standards are appropriate for children and which are not? Should we expect people who have different, for example, religious beliefs than us, to adhere to our own religious standards? Only in a private school setting would I say yes.
Let us strive to raise a generation of independent thinkers, who can read multiple perspectives and come to their own conclusions.
