Every School District should Have Parents Attempt to ban Books
Now wait just a minute you say? Are you kidding me? Don’t you think seeking peace and joy might line up on the side of freedom of ideas? Isn’t it important to express ourselves if we aren’t going to get all tangled up and disturbed? Doesn’t this seem to contradict the notion of encouraging folks to attempt to limit what’s available in the libraries in our schools? Well…..
Let’s throw some facts and ideas around shall we?
To start with the American Library Association (they know a thing or two about books and libraries and such)
Does a survey regularly and what real data show them about people in the U.S. is that in any given year each of us may start reading around 13 books a year. However, we only finish 5 of them. Now in any given year in the modern era there are 150 million books in print. So if any given person is only reading 5 out of 150 million goess what there is only a 1 in 30 million chance that a person reads any given book from cover to cover including the offensive parts. Wait you say we only mean these “new books that have that strange stuff in them”.. Well alright in any given year about 4 million new books get published so the chance a given book gets scanned before it’s banned is 1 in 800,000. Now if our school libraries had more math books perhaps we would all already know these odds, however, there doesn’t seem to be a public outcry for more math books…just saying. In fact down below there are some other “outcry” suggestions… but not quite yet.
Most “books to be Banned” lists contain more than 5 titles so odds are that the folks who want them banned haven’t read them, their families haven’t read them, their kids have never heard of them, and since most school libraries have pitiful budgets once these books are known as controversial they are likely to be stolen and then they won’t be replaced.
Now let’s stick with people being concerned about what’s in the school library for a minute. Before recent days parent’s didn’t seem to care and most parents were far more more likely to know where the football/soccer fields and the basketball floor was than where the library is let alone what’s in the library. So maybe finding out where the library is could be a good first step? Let’s keep moving shall we? Now.. how many parents out there would like to demand that all controversial books be pulled just so students don’t stumble upon one? Well that sounds okay… until… until we have a bunch of books that don’t have recent interpretations of the universe in them. Do we recall that Galileo was tossed out of the church with his book supporting the crazy notion that the Earth and the planets revolve around the sun? He and his book could have been burned for such craziness. Okay you say we don’t mean that kind of book. You mean book full of violence, sex, wars, disasters, demons, people who wentarainst societal norms you know that kind of book? How many copies of the Bible would you like us to pop into the dumpster?
Now…let’s not get all snarky… okay.. we absolutely should focus upon what all children and youth need to learn to be successful contributors to society. Does that include how some people should have sex with some other people or that kids need to worry about whether or not they have the right body parts? Well this might come as a bit of surprise to some folks, however, it seems like human beings have been able to learn about sex without any books at all and the evidence seems pretty clear on that. There wasn’t a gigantic population explosion right after the printing press was invented. Also it wouldn’t seem that teachers have so much time that they need to explore whether Billy should have curvy hips because Francine would honor his feminine side if s/he did.
If we want to expand what schools are going to teach let’s do that. How about beginning with changing a tire? Oh and. If public transit ever gets efficient we might not need to teach that so let’s teach kids how to fix a toilet or unclog a drain in other places because you might not ever use algebra to figure out when the train coming from Chicago is going to pass the farmer. Driving his tractor while listening to willie nelson somewhere in Indiana, but the first time your old college friend and his sister comes to visit your toilet is going to act up for certain.
Oh and while it’s okay to learn how to play kickball or dodgeball because there’s not enough scary stuff coming at us outside of school
Maybe our physical education could include learning how to brush our teeth, eat, drink and wipe ourselves with both or either hand. You see most. Of us are going to break a wrist, burn our hand, dislocate a shoulder etc at some point and these are very handy life skills to know before getting out there among the masses.
Well let’s summarize a bit before this becomes the sequel to War and Peace—we would have said “The Grapes of Wrath” but it’s been banned in some places—
The attempt to ban particular books may point some needed attention at school libraries. On the other hand banning a few books in the total population of available books when people only read a thimble full off books in the bath tub of available books seems pretty inefficient. Oh and if we throw in the 3.75 million YouTube videos added as an information source banning books seems like we are placing a postage stamp sized “caution sign” on a dirt road that sits right next to a wide open superhighway where cars are going80 miles per hour.
There are ideas that are better discussed in homes and other places than in schools not because kids aren’t going to have ideas about things, however, most of these ideas have been shared throughout history way before the printed book and by people who didn’t have to grade papers and have lunchroom duty already. Well and in terms of handling body parts that don’t seem quite right with school curriculums… well I have this small bump about two inches left of center on my chest—should I find the shop teacher and ask if I like Billy or Barbie better will I feel okay ablout the bump? And I have other body parts that I’d like to change…but oh well… I don’t need a library book about that.
So how about we compromise…. If we are going to form committees to ban books then let’s form some to expand knowledge. If you want to ban a book you have to read it in from of someone who wrote the book and ask if you are getting the point and if you are.. then you can ban the book if and only if you write a book to replace it.
Maybe in the end we could all just understand that schools are a learning resource, books are some ideas we shared but won’t demand everyone to agree upon, and that we work hard to find purposes that we can agree upon and then determine what information, analysis , and learning might be needed to address these purposes regardless of what type of people have what types of bodies are involved. Oh and when push comes to shove let’s accept the ideas of Marx—Groucho not Karl… who tells us
Outside of a dog the book is a man’s best friend—inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.”
