A Few Thoughts on the Idea of Banning Books

There is an article in today’s Northwest Florida Daily News discussing one mother’s attempt to have Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 removed from the reading list for 8^th grade students.  As the paper points out there is some irony in having a book about book banning banned by people who want to ban books.  The mother came to recognize this book should be banned when her daughter was reading it and had to ask what the word bastard meant.  She also discovered there were other unsavory things in the book like reference to sex, drugs, suicide, murder and abortion, not to mention taking the Lord’s name in vain.

Her point is the school is supposed to be a safe space, and the students sign a pledge not to use profanity in the school, so they should not be allowed or required to read books with those same profanities.  She suggests several suitable alternatives, only a couple of which have been recommended by other parents to banned for their treatment of the language and the themes discussed.

Obviously, the idea of banning books is not a new idea -- if it was Ray Bradbury would have never written about it, but the question is how do we decide what books a school system should allow, and what books they should not.  Clearly not every book written gets to be included in the curriculum so how do we decide what is okay?  The courts have ruled that something called “community standards” is one consideration.  For example, Salem Massachusetts may be a little sensitive to books advocating that we burn witches so they might choose as a group not to use books that advocate for that practice.  That is not quite the same thing as recommending all witch-burning books be destroyed or otherwise made unavailable to the average reader.  But what is one to do if a single family disagrees?  Must we as a community make allowance for all who would question a decision like what books to read?

While I can appreciate a parent’s desire to protect their child from the ugliness of the world, I also believe it is a mistake to stifle a child at the exact time they are trying to formulate their individuality from seeing the world from a variety of discordant views. The role of a good parent is to acknowledge the differences of the world and guide their children into understanding what is of value and what is not.  I think the thing that troubles me most about this issue is the idea that knowledge is viewed as dangerous by so many on both sides of the ideological spectrum.

We hear that idea of “safe-space” thrown around all over the place.  Colleges are becoming infamous for their students demanding ideas, which disagree with what their teachers and peers have said is true be banned from the public forum.  At the same time, these young unthinking minds will condemn those who wish to ban ideas based on things like religion.  It is a curious social quagmire we find ourselves in. 

We have coined the term “hate-speech” to address language that may inflame people, yet we selectively allow certain groups to use those terms because they claim if they use them it isn’t a racial slur.  The problem with this concept is there is no authoritative body to approve or append the hate speech vocabulary.  Maybe we need something like the Académie française?

In this particular case, the school board reviewed the mother’s concerns and decided that Ray’s book was okay, especially in light of the court fiasco an adjacent county went through a few years ago over the same book. I look forward to the Letters to the Editor in the upcoming days, as various opinions are offered.