Okay, let me just say right out that banning books is just wrong.
There’s a particular incident of book banning that is drawing a lot of attention right now, and that’s the banning of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five and Sarah Ockler’s Twenty Boy Summer from the schools of Republic, Missouri. One Wesley Scroggins challenged the books, as well as Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, saying that they taught principles contrary to the Bible.
School libraries really take a beating in the censorship wars. People are so bound and determined to protect their children from anything that might violate their innocence. And, unlike public libraries, schools are in loco parentis, which means they are supposed to act “in place of the parent”. The simplest thing to do is to just take the book off the shelf when a parent complains, or when your principal is staring you down. It doesn’t make you feel good about yourself, but putting yourself out there at the possible cost of losing your job is a scary thing to do. That sort of informal, er, agreement, happens a lot at the classroom or building level. It happens more when there’s no selection policy or challenge procedure in place. One of the things that gets drilled into you early in library school is to make sure you have a detailed selection policy and a formal challenge procedure in your policy manual. While a lot of parental objections are easily dealt with on the individual level (Oh, you don’t want your son reading Junie B. Jones? Let him know he isn’t supposed to check those books out- you can always return them), a selection policy spells out how and why you choose the materials you do, and a formal challenge procedure means that challenge will go up the line, as far as it needs to, and as publicly as possible.
So Wesley Scroggins challenged these three books, and instead of a principal hiding them in a closet, or a school board voting against them without even reading them, the school board did something I think is pretty neat. It’s not something they HAD to do. They developed and used a selection policy and went through a formal challenge process. Nothing about it was a secret. Just the way ALA wants it to be, although the results are obviously NOT the ones ALA, or almost any librarian, wants them to be, with Twenty Boy Summer and Slaughterhouse Five removed from the schools. But because of that policy and all the discussion that took place, Speak, the third challenged book, has remained in the schools there.
Am I cheering for the school board’s decision to remove the books from the schools? Heck no. But the silver lining here is that because the school board took this so seriously, and because they had a selection policy and formal challenge procedure, it may be a lot simpler to appeal the decision, and, I hope, get it reversed. And nobody was fired, either.
In the meantime, if you’d like to make certain that the students of Republic, Missouri will have access to copies of Slaughterhouse Five, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library is giving copies to them for free. If you would like to contribute a donation to make that possible, click here. I don’t think Sarah Ockler, the author of Twenty Boy Summer, has a similar setup, but perhaps, if you’d like to see the students of Republic, Missouri have access to her book as well, you could send a copy, or a designated donation, to the
Republic Branch Library of the Springfield-Greene County Library System, as all the copies appear to be checked out, and there’s a list for holds.
You don’t have to wait for September and Banned Books Week. Now is a great time to read, and give, a banned book.
Liz B
August 7, 2011 at 11:58 am
I like that the school board went through that process, and I like even more that these books will be read by MORE people than if they’d never been challenged. Even bad publicity is good publicity, and that goes double for banned books.
Kirsten
August 8, 2011 at 11:16 am
That’s true, Liz, as I hadn’t ever heard of Sarah Ockler or Twenty Boy Summer but now that I have, I’ve looked it up, found it for 2.99 as an ebook at BN.com (it’s also available as a Kindle ebook), bought it, and read it.
brett
August 17, 2011 at 1:07 am
I most definitely agree that banning books is stupid, if not ethically criminal.
What makes me happy about instances like this is that they actually help raise awareness of the problem and usually get more people reading THOSE books than ever before.
Following are some of the most challenged books in the USA. I’m proud to have read them all and know that I would be so much poorer if I had not been able to.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 1852
All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque, 1928
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway, 1929
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck, 1939
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway, 1940
Animal Farm, George Orwell , 1949 (sidenote time: this was required reading in English class by the 60s)
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway, 1926 (do you think they just watched for his name, without reading the book?)
Lady Chatterly’s Lover, D.H. Lawrence, 1928
Jaws, Peter Benchly, 1974
On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin, 1859
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien, 1954
The Last Temptation of Christ, Nikos Kazantzakis, 1960
Harry Potter Series, J.K. Rowling, 1997 – 2007
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1850
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain, 1884
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, 1932
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger, 1951
Catch-22, Joseph Heller, 1991
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey, 1962
MonsterLibrarian
August 17, 2011 at 9:03 am
Wow, Brett, I am really impressed! A lot of those books were or are required reading in middle or high school, which is why they are targeted. From your list. My high school required reading included The Grapes of Wrath, Animal Farm, The Scarlet Letter, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Brave New World. A parent in my school also complained about the teaching of Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, and someone ran for school board on the platform that she would remove Fahrenheit 451 from the curriculum. No, that is not a joke. Sadly, censors, or would-be censors, don’t have much of a sense of irony.
brett
August 19, 2011 at 11:00 pm
I have always been a voracious reader since I could turn the pages. I primarily read science fiction, horror and thriller, but also enjoy several non-fiction genres. Ancient history to physics, wood working to art.
I have to admit that I read many of these banned books simply because they were banned or there was controversy about them. I have always thought that anything that gets people upset, I should know more about. If I am going to argue for or against something, I need to know enough about it to be believable and convincing. I also need to know enough to be able to argue both sides, play devils advocate (my favorite!).
I have also discovered that most, if not all, of the banned books are very good reading and usually are relevant to real life.
Rebel with a cause.
Censors, religious fanatics and the moral minority (grin) wouldn’t know irony if it hit them head on!