Libraries, censorship dangerous bedfellows
How eerily apropos of School Library Month are the recent headlines of political advocates for censorship.
Each April since 1985, school librarians are celebrated and communities encouraged to help foster the roles of libraries in education and child development. Never has that included promoting banned books, or worse, banned subjects.
Yet here we are.
Obviously, many materials are not appropriate for underage consumption – hence the separated sections of age-segregated books for kids, adults, and “young adults” (teens) in every public and school library. Yet within those categories are broad arrays of subjects, and so should it remain.
Not every subject on offer is palatable to every parent, nor appropriate for every child. Families are not cookie-cutter. Nor are the children within them.
So it’s incumbent on parents and guardians to help them choose, to veto what they find wrong for that child at that time, or just plain wrong.
That decision — that kind of censorship, if you will - should be left to the family who monitors a child's reading, not to the elected library board. Library boards (who are supposed to be nonpartisan) should not raise other people’s children, in this aspect or any other. That’s not their role.
Looking at it from another perspective, consider freedom.
I had the great fortune of being raised in two very different countries. One was in the Near East, in a nation not founded on democratic principles — in a culture, while as loving and family oriented as any other, governed by a much more hands-on approach. In that country today what is available to read in print or online by children and adults is carefully culled by a governing group, according to religious and political principles.
They decide what’s good for others. Individuals and families are not free to decide for themselves. The choice is taken from them. Approve or disapprove of those choices, that is not freedom.
Is that really what we want to build here? Yes, librarians and school curriculum developers have limited class time and shelf space and thus must repeatedly decide what to include within those limits. Books move on and off shelves and reading lists. But it’s another thing altogether to ban entire subjects, or entire perspectives.
That is censorship. And having lived it both ways, believe me, it’s not what we want. A free people cannot be so without unfettered access to information.
“[Confiscating a book] is a sign that one does not have a good case, or at least doesn't trust it enough to defend it with reasons and refute the objections. Some people even go so far as to consider prohibited or confiscated books to be the best ones of all, for the prohibition indicates that their authors wrote what they really thought rather than what they were supposed to think.” — Johann Lorenz Schmidt, 1741
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Sholeh Patrick is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network. Contact her at Sholeh@cdapress.com.