Banned books

[Kathy813]

Dazed and Confused~ I had the same reaction to the schools turning kids into difficult children comment.

I am always interested in reading how different states handle education issues. Georgia is nothing like California . . . parents have the right to limit acceptable reading materials that can be checked out in both school libraries and public libraries.

What really upsets me is that despite the right to control their own child's reading materials, zealots here still try to ban books for everyone else's children.

I had posted about a lady that tried to ban Harry Potter books from my county's schools a couple of years ago. She admitted that the reason she was trying to ban them was because they conflicted with her religious beliefs. Even though she was able to limit her own childrens' access, she went through the local school committee (parents and teachers), the county level committee (parents, teachers, county school officials, and community leaders) and finally the court system in her efforts to get the books banned. She was turned down at every level and threatened to take it to the Georgia supreme court. I haven't heard about her in a while so I guess she has given up her crusade against Harry Potter.

~Kathy

 

[Lothlorien]

Kathy, I wonder if that woman ever actually read the Harry Potter series? I read them....all of them. I always want to have a discussion about how there are a lot of biblical similarities in the books and if they actually read the books, they might perceive them a little differently. I have a friend who is dead set against them, because of what she was told and won't let her kids read them. When I had a discussion with her about them, she said I was the first person who actually told her about the biblical symbolism in the books. I asked her if any of her friends actually read the books and she said no.

OTH, my husband and his friends were in the school library one day and his friend picked up a book that had instructions on making bombs....this was in the early 80's. That kid ended up making small bombs and blowing up high school toilets etc and all kinds of other imaginable things. Eventually he ended up on the bomb squad in the military and is now a police officer.....bomb squad.

 

[Kathy813]

Loth ~ She was asked that question by newspaper reporters. She said that she didn't have to read them to know that they were bad and that she had seen excerpts on the Internet which was all she needed to see.



~Kathy

 

[muttmeister]

Part of the problem is that half of the people in the country have taken leave of their senses. I'm beginning to believe that there are more nuts in the world than sane people, and with the nuts I include a good percentage of parents, teachers, school administrators, lawyers, judges, and the list goes on.
A gun catalog in school? NUTS
Sexually explicit materials in grade school? NUTS
Forbidding the mention of birth control? NUTS
Censoring Shakespeare? NUTS
Banning anything you disagree with? NUTS
AND THE LIST GOES ON

School librarians and teachers and administrators are supposed to be sensible enough to provide materials that are appropriate for the kids they are serving AND MOST ARE VERY GOOD AT THEIR JOBS but, as they say, it only takes one bad apple to ruin the whole lot.

Parents are supposed to look out for the interests of their own kids without trying to force their ideas on people with different ones. MOST ARE GOOD AT THAT TOO but the others are becoming more and more vocal and more and more abundant.

For some reason it seems that right now everybody has a short fuse. We have beome intolerant and rude and loud and obnoxious. There are time when people disagree with me and I find myself reacting rudely and wanting to shout great obscenities at them, even though I know a calm, soft answer would be better. Why have we all become so tightly strung and so intolerant of other people's views? It seems to me that that is one of the main problems of the present time. If you don't agree with me I'm going to shout you down and call you stupid and try to get hundreds of people to march against you. Instead I should be trying to talk to you calmly and if my ideas are so great, they should be self apparent.
I think I'll go eat some chocolate. Of course, if there was somebody in my house who was allergic to it, they'd probably try to sue me!

 

[Marguerite]

I'm not going to refer to religious opinions here, just "opinions of special interest groups". Because I find it seems more connected with that, than with genuine, informed, educated, considered opinion.

People who really THINK about a topic before coming to a conclusion will be people I will always be willnig to talk to about a topic. But those who have a blanket approach based on what someone else has told them, especially what someone else has told them they should be thinking or saying - I have found that it saves time to whistle and walk away. DO NOT ENGAGE - because if they refuse to be informed, then trying to talk to them will be met (at least metaphorically) with them sticking their fingers in their ears and saying, "la, la, la, la..."

Example - back in early 1974, I was visiting a friend with a really great sound system. He also tended to have the latest albums. We enjoyed listening to "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" and a somewhat avant-garde album from Britain, "Tubular Bells". There was great stuff on both albums, each very different. "Tubular Bells" had a wide range of different tracks, all leading up to the title track which was a modern take on an old idea - begin with a single theme and keep adding another instrument until you have the full effect. I thik Purcell did it. Even "Peter & the Wolf" had aversion of it, with each instrument representing a different animal and having its own theme, all of it coming together in the finale. Nothing unusual there, nothing controversial.

Then the film "The Exorcist" came out, using part of one track from "Tubular Bells" in its theme. Suddenly certain groups wanted the album banned because it as "satanic". Nothing to do with the movie (which deom a religious point of view was a classic good vs evil battle with good winning). No, I was told that "Tubula Bells" was satanic, because the repetitious nature of the theme was hypnotic and such exposure to the mindless repetition left your soul vulnerable to invasion by evil forces. Gee, if that were so then my mind was invaded long ago, thanks to midlessly repetitive maths lessons at school!

That album had been around without protest for about a year, before the "ooh, watch out, it's satanic" rubbish was tossed around.

What I'm saying - too many of these protests about books, music, ideas - they come from people merely repeating scare-mongering hysteria instead of people really THINKING about the topic. And more than anything else, I get really angry with people mindlessly repeating bigotry and fear-mongering, simply because someone else has said, "it's a worry."

Talk about soulless, hypnotic, mind-destroying repetition...

And I STILL think "Tubular Bells" is a great album!

Marg

 

[lizanne2]

I have a button reading...i read banned books. My difficult child 2 put it on his backpack.

When my son was in preschool he had a favorite book. He liked to have it read to him during nap time. We thought it was his favorite book because it was about a boy who got a new bicycle for his birthday. One day a classmate of his borrowed the book and brought it home. The next day the parent returned the book to the school and requested it be removed from the class library. Apparently they had problem with the depiction of race in the book.

My difficult child got to then bring the book home and keep it. It was until three weeks later when my mom came for a visit that I learned why difficult child 2 liked. The gramma in the book was seen reading to the grandson. White grandma and kind of black grandson. He showed her just that page.

Banning this book any earlier would have deprived my son of an important self affirming experince that he chose to repeat often.

Just my experience.

 

[Marguerite]

White grandma and kind of black grandson

Annd it might simply have been that in the picture, grandma's face was more in light while grandson's face, being smaller and perhaps hidden by the book, was more in shadow.

I wrote a short story which was published in the local paper. A local activist and friend of mine came to me to complain about what I had written - in my story I had mentioned the kids passing around cans of coke (lower case C). My friend was objecting because he felt my story was one more example of promotion of caffeine-laden drinks to teenagers and therefore my story was immoral and serving the marketing campaigns of what he sees as immoral multinational drug pushing companies.

I had thought I'd written an innocent story about kids having fun...

ANother story - years ago (decaes ago) husband & I used to occasionally vist a local nude beach. To get to tis beach you have to walk for almost an hour along a wild beach, through thorny brush, along animal tracks over ants nests and finally clamber down a narrow almost vertical cliff path, to a tiny scrap of rocky inlet surrounded by sheer cliffs four metres high. Anyone wanting to 'perve' on nude bathers is always visible and can be easily thwarted by beathers edging up against the cliff edge or under the sandstone overhang. You have to go to a lot of trouble to get an eyefull, and what you see is generally not worth looking at anyway.
One afternoon I was working in my garden when a local religious nutter (and remember, I do go to church so this guy was not a nutter in my view simply because he was religious) came around to visit with his tracts and pamphlets. He lowered his voice almost conspiratorially to tell me of the horrors and outrage he had witnessed that very afternoon at the nude beach. He was saying that such people are clear evidence of the moral decay in our society and how we must join in protest at the flagrant and open display of so much flesh, right there for all to see.
I couldn't resist it. "Yes, it's right there for all to see - right after you trek across the beach, tripping over the anchor ropes of all the pleasure craft that tie up illegally, then you shred your skin by clambering through the thorny bushes on the headland, get bittten by several nests of bull-ants, risk getting gored by feral pigs before finally tumbling down the water-erodfed ravine to land on the rocky beach. Yes, some people go to amazing lengths in order to be outraged."
In other words - if it offends you, don't peer over the cliff top. It's not even signposted! There is no other reason for anyone to be there.

Some people need a cause in life. Frankly, the environment is perhaps a more worthy cause. Or third world poverty. Morality is simply too subjective, it's too variable from one society to another, we should stop trying to impose our own moral standards on everybody else.

Marg

 

[JJJ]

However, if a kid gets a book on guns from a public library, should the the librarian deny that child access to it? Would the librarian then have to use his or her judgement on the child's motivation and reasons for getting the book?

Nope, because parents are the ones that bring children (or allow them to go) to the public library so the parents can vet the books their child checks out.

Huh??? Schools and their libraries are responsible for turning kids in difficult children? Did I actually read that??

If freedom to read anything turned a kid into a difficult child I would be the Queen Mother of difficult children.

That didn't come out right. The freedom to read is good. It is the lack of respect for a parent's decision as to what their child reads that is a problem. When a parent tells a child, you may not read XYZ because we believe to do so is immoral (or whatever reason), and then the school facilitates the child being able to do so behind the parents back that leads children astray. It is only school libraries that I feel should restrict their collections.

I have read at the college level since I was 10 years old. I read 100s of books per year. I have read most "banned" books My only 'bad' reading experience came from when I was 11 or 12 and checked out a book with a cool title not understanding that it had rape scenes in it. I wish the librarian had said, "honey, you might be a little young for that, let's talk to your mom".

 

[WhymeMom?]

I must admit if I was back in high school and was handed a banned book list I would have done my best to read every book on it.......

 

[DammitJanet]

Whymemom...me too! LOL.

My mom gave me The Happy Hooker in 7th grade because she supposedly thought it was about a drug addict. Yeah right. Boy did that make me popular...lol.

When The Di Vinci Code came out and then the movie, I couldnt believe the uproar. I loved both of them. We had protesters in my small town. I actually asked one of the protesters if they had seen the movie or read the book and they admitted they hadnt but their church had told them it was an evil book. Hmmm. How do you know something is evil and to not like it unless you read it for yourself? Personally I found it quite interesting and thought provoking. I like Dan Brown's theories.

 

[JJJ]

I love Da Vinci Code! (the book, hated the movie). I'm reading his newest The Lost Symbol. If you haven't got it yet, go get it! It is excellent.

 

[DammitJanet]

Billy just downloaded it to his ereader. I am gonna read it as soon as he is done. Did you read or see Angels and Demons? I did both. Of course the movies are never as good as the books but I enjoyed the movies too. He has another book about an iceburg but I cant remember the name of it...lol. It was good too.

 

[Lothlorien]

Whymemom....yep! I would have done the exact same thing! Cripes, when they made a big deal about Sambo, I was looking everywhere for that book.

When I was in about 5th grade, I was in a gifted program in school. There was a book that I think might have been a Judy Bloom book, but it was for older kids, in the room's library. This room was specifically for gifted kids up to 8th. This book probably shouldn't have been in there. I got about 3/4 through this fairly sexual book (took about two days) before the teacher realized I had it and took it away from me. Well, I found the book somewhere else and read the rest of it. It didn't do me any harm, but I certainly would question the teacher's judgement, now, for having that in her library collection and if my 10 year old was reading it.

 

[JJJ]

Janet - yes, I've read all of his books. The iceberg book is Deception Point. also very good. I wish he wrote more.