I’ve recently started an elective all about book banning. So far, we have been focusing on the banning of children’s books. It’s pretty interesting, and it’s brought up a lot of interesting topics around censorship. It’s also brought up the whole point of: Who has the right to censor things? In particular in children, is it their parent? Or should it be up to the child (after a certain age)? Some people, of course, for some reason have the impression that they need to protect everyone’s children, including their own.
Some of the children’s books that we’ve been looking at were old favorites of mine, and it just makes me mad that some children won’t have access to them. For example, Shel Silverstein’s “Where the Sidewalk Ends.” It’s just a book of fun, silly, rhyming poems with illustrations, but some people think it suggests “drugs, violence, suicide, the occult”, sets a bad example, BLAH BLAH BLAH. Some think the poem Dreadful, which joking talks about eating a baby, would encourage cannibalism in kids! Do they really think kids are that stupid? It’s RIDICULOUS! =(
The book we were focusing on today was Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are.” I love that book! It’s even been made into a movie! But it’s been banned because the monsters are so grotesque they could give children nightmares, and the fact that Max is sent to bed without dinner could give them psychological scars. Again, FREAKING RIDICULOUS!!
I could go on forever, but I won’t. But whoever reads this (if anyone actually does =P), should definitely go and find out more for themselves. Here are a couple of sites that I liked:
http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/parenting/banned-books-week-shel-silverstein-278259
http://worldsstrongestlibrarian.com/2283/book-review-where-the-wild-things-are/
http://logicalcomplexinfinitive.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/and-tango-makes-three-the-most-banned-book-in-2008/
-Juliamoeba
