At what point do we stop banning books?

I am so sick and tired reading about people who want to ban books from schools and libraries on the premise that such books shouldn’t be read by school children. These book banners are whiners who have nothing better to do with their time but find fault.

While 1995 was a banner year for people attempting to restrict or eliminate access to certain books with 762 challenges, the year 2008 held its own with 661 banned books. Sexually explicit passages, offensive language, and unsuitability to a particular age group were the most common objections.

All of the Harry Potter books have been strongly and persistently challenged by parents and sometimes actually removed from school libraries for promoting witchcraft and disobedience to adults. A case in Georgia went as far as Superior Court, where Judge Ronnie Batchelor (no relation to me) upheld local school officials’ decision that the books are good tools for encouraging children to read.

In 2007, a patron refused to return It’s Perfectly Normal: A Book about Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health to her public library in Maine, stating she was “horrified by the illustrations and sexually graphic, amoral, abnormal contents.” The patron who removed the book stood trial for theft, after a police investigation found the library innocent of obscenity charges.

Here are some other books that have been banned in some libraries and schools. Winnie-the-Pooh, Slaughterhouse Five, The Wind in the Willows, The Prince of Tides, The Grapes of Wrath, In Cold Blood, Beloved, And Tango Makes Three. The last book is the story of male penguins raising an orphaned chick that topped the US banned books list. There are many gays raising children with court approval. It's regrettable that some parents believe reading a true story about two male penguins hatching an egg will damage their children's moral development.

All of these and many more well-known titles have been targets for groups or individuals who objected to their themes, language or stories and tried to keep them out of libraries or schools, sometimes successfully unless courts intervened. Since its instant success in 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird, the story of racial injustice in the American South told from the point of view of a little white girl, has courted controversy.

A school district in Nova Scotia tried to pull the book from classroom instruction in 2002; in August 2009, a Brampton principal took the book off the Grade 10 reading list (but not out of the library) after a parent complained about its use of the word; ‘nigger’.

That complaint comes from a parent at a Toronto high school who believes there are more appropriate books to read in Grade 10 than Harper Lee's acclaimed novel about a black man wrongfully convicted of raping a white woman in Alabama during the Depression. The mother wants the book removed from the curriculum.

Mockingbird proponents agree it is sensitive material that requires thoughtful discussion and analysis, but not censorship, while critics say the solution is not to ban, but rather to widen the lens through which a seminal moment in civil rights history is understood by our school children.

In my opinion, people should read the book, just like people should read Uncle Tom's Cabin. The fact is that there are few better books that can portray the Depression period in American history than To Kill a Mockingbird. The book is often presented as the literature that portrays the beginning of the civil rights movement.

To some critics, their main objection to the book is that it distorts a period in time by implying that there was no African-American self-emancipation. So what? Is that information so harmful that we don’t want our children to read about the difficulties that blacks encountered with respect their rights and the injustices done to them in the United States in that era?

Josh Matlow, a Toronto public school trustee, believes To Kill a Mockingbird presents a part of history that is vitally important for students to learn about. He said, "Just because there have been experiences that have been contentious and controversial and difficult, we can't erase that history, nor should we."

To Kill a Mockingbird is often a point of contention, usually because of its offensive language. However it is also about white people, white guilt. If we're going to teach teenagers about equity and fairness and citizenship, they have to have an understanding of the way things were and the battles that were fought in the civil rights movement. To read To Kill a Mockingbird is an entertaining and informative way to learn about that era.

The principal at Toronto's Malvern Collegiate said students are never forced to read any book. If a student feels uncomfortable with a book's subject matter, an alternative is offered.

I disagree with the opinion of George Elliott Clarke, a Canadian author and poet of African-American and Mi'kmaq heritage, who says black parents are within their rights to object to abusive language like the ‘nigger’ word, even if it is correct in its use. No other minority group would stand to have such a hateful word used around it, he said. he admits however that raising legitimate concerns about a book does not necessarily mean that a book should be banned.

Although some books written in the same era as To Kill a Mockingbird have the word, ‘nigger’ in them, such as one of Mark Twain’s books, that doesn’t mean that such books shouldn’t be read by our children.

I have lived in eras where the word ‘nigger’ was used and then replaced with ‘coloured’ and finally changed to ‘blacks’. Does this mean that when blacks were referred to as ‘coloured people’ that any books written during that era that used that term should be banned? I don’t think so.

Clarke said “To Kill a Mockingbird is a fine book, a wonderful book but a lot has changed in the 50 years that it has been on the curriculum, and it is time to move on from books that feed the civil rights movement nostalgia.”

More recently, that issue of relevance has centred around To Kill a Mockingbird to Canadian students, many decades and kilometres removed from 1960s United States. However, if you take this argument to its logical extension, you could say that students shouldn't be reading stories of the past, such as Shakespeare, (life in England) Dostoevsky (life in Russia) or Dickens (life in London) or authors from other countries or other cultures because what they wrote about is not current or applicable in our country. Such reasoning is so stupid, it is unnecessary to try and justify it.

We should be exposing our children to a variety of different kinds of literature, from a variety of authors from around the world and different historical periods.

Nothing, in my view, is more important to the wellbeing of democracy than the free flow of information, ideas and opinions.

We are walking on a slippery slope when anyone can take it upon him or herself to dictate what people should or should not read and at the same time, we don’t take issue with their demands. There are still individuals who feel they can get books thrown out of public and private schools and libraries and dictate what everybody else may or may not read. Both the American and Canadian constitutions guarantees everyone in our two countries the right to think for ourselves. There are only three kinds of books that should be banned, They are child pornography, books advocating terrorism and race hatred.

It is a strange aspect of our society that really good books often make some of its readers appear damn stupid. The stupid ones are those who declare that they want the books banned. The idea of banning books from our past that spoke of things we don’t want to admit to in our present era; is that we are prevented from delving into our past through the written word.

It is unfortunate that many of our children are not reading as many books as we did when we were young. That is because of the onset of television. If this trend keeps up, by the turn of the century, the only books that will be read are religious books, law books, bankbooks, cookbooks and trading stamp books.

If we want our youth of today to appreciate book reading, we have to stop trying to limit what they should read.