Sept. 25 marked the beginning of the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week, an occasion to highlight books that have been banned or challenged through the years while promoting the right of individuals to make their own reading choices.
According to the association, in 2009 there were 460 challenges of books on religious, racist, political or sexual grounds. About 75 percent of those challenges occurred in schools, by people unhappy with the reading selections available to students.
Among the top 10 most frequently challenged books are such classics as “To Kill a Mockingbird,” by Harper Lee, and “Catcher in the Rye,” by J.D. Salinger. They are joined on the list by other, lesser works, such as the “Twilight” series and “The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round Things.” Included in banned lists have been titles such as Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” and John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men.”
Fortunately, according to the association, most of these challenges failed. Banning books runs counter to the spirit of free speech and open discourse, exactly the ideals that should be embraced by our schools and taught to our students.
While we now have access to an unending flow of information, we are hardly more informed. The information comes to us from many different sources, some reliable but many not, and often without any editing or vetting.
It takes a critical and curious mind to sort through the garbage and pull out the facts. To foster that kind of thinking, we must allow students to take on the great books that describe our complicated world, and trust that they can, with a little help, understand the context of the racism in “Huckleberry Finn” or the sexuality in “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” another book found on the 2009 list.
So while books should be read at the proper age, those limits should not be too restrictive. Children are often more perceptive, resilient and capable than they are given credit for.
We agree with Valerie Osborne of the Maine State Library, who in a release last week wrote, “Banned Books Week reminds us that while not every book is intended for every reader, we each have a right to decide for ourselves what we read, listen to or view. In the case of children, the choice should be made by the people who know them the best – their parents.”
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