Censorship
I wanted to talk about this more because this is such a strong issue to me. It seems so unfair to me that books like Harry Potter can get banned from schools simply because they are a fairy tale book about wizards and magic. We read fairy tales to children all day, and that is okay. Where is the line drawn that Judy Bloom is too risky but Cinderella is perfectly okay. The story Cinderella is about a White woman who wants her prince and when she finds him and marries him life is perfect. That is a more toxic story to me than wizards and magic. Also why do Christians get to have so much pull in our education system? The political structures that serve our system I understand are predominately Christian, but most of the time no other views are relevant. I also believe that we are doing ourselves no justice when we begin to let the government dictate what we can teach children and what we cannot. This should be the job of the families in the community and the school system working together. The more power we give our government to “protect” us, the more we loose out on our own social power and knowledge.
May 21st, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Hi Melissa — I couldn’t agree more! I think that our schools need to have the right to expose our children to what we as educators deem appropriate. It’s not okay for third parties to decide what is best for the children of our classroom. The right to educate belongs to the ones actually doing the work.