Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Ban That Book!




            I was surfing the Weird Wide Web, and found a site that has the history of banned books.  I never realized how many books have been banned before!  I still don’t think it’s enough though.  We need to get to work to ban more books.  A lot of people miss books that they may consider okay, but if they really examined them, they would agree that these books need to be banned.  For the children.  I find whenever you are trying to do something unpopular that as long as you say you’re doing it for the children, you are in the clear.
            Here are some of the other books that we need to ban, for the children.  We need to begin with shorter stories and the first I’d like to address is ‘The Little Engine That Could.’  The sexual references in this book are over the top.  The graphic imagery of the train again and again trying to reach the climax or the top of the hill is downright pornographic.  Beyond that, the integrity of our students and children come into question.  How can our kids be equally compared with this ‘Little Engine?’  Do we really expect them to try and try again, even against what may be insurmountable odds?  What if what our kids are facing is an impossible task?  What if they’re trying to turn lead to gold?  Shouldn’t they just eventually give up?  This book sends the wrong message and should be banned, for the children.
            Books that were written over a year ago should all be banned as well.  These books are not culturally relevant anymore.  They’re about olden times, and no one cares.  Hollywood has it right on always staying new, keeping with the ‘Tomorrow is yesterdays news’ credo.  Books need to do this as well.  Stay on the cutting edge.  Even if the book is about the future, it’s about yesterday’s future which is different than today’s.  Our children deserve better than left over thoughts from last year. 
            New books should also be banned because we haven’t had enough time to decide whether or not the content of the book is appropriate for our children.  Luckily, we could create a panel of readers to spend some time poring over the book to decide whether or not it is in fact appropriate for our children.  They could spend a year deliberating, at which time the book would be banned as it is over a year old.  This would effectively remove most of the reading material from our shelves.  By the way, I’d love to be paid to be on this panel. 
            How can we really be sure that a book won’t have a negative impact on someone?  I say we can’t.  We can no longer allow parents to make decisions on what their children should be allowed to read.  What if something they think is okay for their kids to read isn’t really okay?  What if they missed the character that was representational of Jesus and that character was evil?  We can’t trust parents to pick out all of these symbolic images that most books have.  We can’t even trust most parents to read the books their kids are reading before their kids do to decide it’s appropriate.  And when a book is banned, we can’t trust a parent to read that book and make a good decision on whether that book should be banned for their kid.  All of this is too political, and we can’t trust anyone by themselves making a political decision.  Ban books, do it for the children. 
           

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