Protecting Children from Getting the Wrong Ideas

It’s Banned Books Week again. I’ve just finished reading Lois Lowry’s The Giver, which has been one of the most challenged books in the country several times since being published in 1993. Parents made a concerted effort to have it removed from the reading list at in the district neighboring my own when I was in school.

So there’s that. People never seem to tire of trying to keep ideas they don’t like away from kids. The most recent hot button is the attempt to ban Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak.

Pulling the books from library shelves and reading lists is one way that people try to keep ideas from harming kids. Editing the harmful ideas out of the material is another. Honestly, I didn’t even know the later was a popular option until I saw it discussed in a YA lit blog entry.

Philip Nel, English professor and children’s literature commentator, frames the issue on his blog. He teaches a course about censorship of kid’s lit that he says is about “what you can and can’t say in literature for children and young adults.” And it seems that if you say the wrong thing, many people feel it is their right and responsibility to ensure that children will never know it.

This treatment canned be used as a fix for most books on the Most Challenged list, but beloved classics are being reissued with a new coat of paint that is meant to obscure the overt signs of values that would disturb most modern readers. Plenty of thoughtful people are considering the validity and effectiveness of this approach, and they seem to be coming to the same conclusion. It is better to supervise how kid’s experience the original than to give them tidied up versions. I agree, as far as that goes, but I still think they’re missing the point.

We are not giving kids enough credit. Yes, they should learn to read critically, and it’s great for them to get to talk about some of what they’re reading with their parents, but if we look over their shoulder at most of what they are reading, we will being taking something valuable away from them. There is an experience you can have of a story that can’t happen if someone is guiding and monitoring your reactions. The personal meaning you find, and all the connections to your own experience. The most important books in my life were like personal treasures. Didn’t we all read these same classics? We grew up to be thoughtful, conscientious people who care about books and care about children and care what kind of people they will grow to be. We did it with those imperfect stories as part of what got us here. The children we want so much to protect are capable of doing the same.