The Pros And Cons Of Censorship In Schools

The most debated and controversial form of censorship is the banning of books in school libraries and classrooms. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Call of the Wild, The Catcher in the Rye, and To Kill a Mockingbird are just a few of the books that have been expelled from the American public schools. Of course most schools don’t follow this ‘regulation’ and actually encourage their students to read books from the banned book registry. Teachers love challenging their students and trying to push them outside their comfort zone, but parents can sometimes view the challenges as bad and often times they see the material as unsuitable for their children.
The First Amendment of the Constitution states; “Congress shall make no law respecting …show more content…
The first metaphor Boyd uses is censorship as a barbed wire fence. He compares it to being a barbed wire fence because you can clearly see through the fence, but the fence is blocking all passage through it. Censorship does the same thing; it evokes barriers to free thought and speech when it blocks knowledge acquisition, intellectual development, and creative/critical thinking. The second metaphor used is censorship as a patina. A patina is a layer or coating that appears on metals or other surfaces as a result of age or exposure to elements like chemical or weather. Boyd tells us that censorship is seen as a patina when books that are important for deepening concepts, seeing from different perspectives, and understanding universal qualities are banned. The banning of these books creates an impediment from those who want to access those qualities. The third metaphor Boyd uses is censorship as a dangerous tightrope. Teachers are the tightrope walkers, who often teeter between what they know is good scholastic practice, what their students need and want, what their students’ parents demand, and what school administrations ask them to do. The teachers need to find the right balance between these hardships in order to give their students the education they deserve and …show more content…
First we need to identify the problem and look at all those books on the banned books list. Why was this book banned? Is it because of a few sentences that a few people took offensive to? Or is it the message the book as a whole is portraying? Second we need to look at what people find offensive as a whole. Is it mainly religious issues or is it heinous/violent scenes? Is it a couple of swear words? Because these days people in America can take any sort of reading or viewing material and find offense in it. At the rate we are going we will be banning every book there is. Finally we need to figure out if banning these books is more important than our youth’s