Student Fights Against Censorship

When one thinks of censorship, they state it is where one takes away a point of view from being seen by an individual because it goes against their beliefs. Thus when one fights against censorship, many times it creates a new form of censorship due to the hegemony of the environment a person wants to create. A person might stop the censorship of the theory of evolution and cause a new censorship of intelligent design theory. Or one might bring in books to read that paint everyone in a group as being good but take away any books that paint those characters in a bad light. Rather than censoring the “opposing” point of view, allowing it to be shown side by side would be a better option. Allowing such books to be provided to a student creates a …show more content…
Rather than supporting your own beliefs, the student must research ways that support the opposing side. It is required then that students are given access to information for both views on an issue within the library, classroom, and online (where most information is filtered out unless using a proxy). This focus allows a student to see and understand why someone thinks the way they do. Then when confronted in real life where one tries to argue their beliefs, they can understand where the other is coming from and counteract it far better. This creates a far more open minded society over one that is purely hegemonic in thought. This is reinforced by a student, as quoted in Jole Seroff’s article, when asked about how they thought of going to a school which had open discussions. “Hearing them articulate a broad range of positions helped her reflect on her own beliefs. So, while she praises our community, she also indicates a challenge posed by the relative uniformity of our population” (21). If students feel so strongly about being able to hear opposing views to help them reinforce or change their world view, why can teachers not help them as their job is to mold a student’s mind into the best it can be? Letting the child form how a classroom should be run in a diplomatic way can help to build a stronger thinking student …show more content…
Single stories, even if they are positive, it can cause one to still have tunnel vision and think that because a person is from a certain community they must be like what the stories state. Reading Kite Runner, and explaining that there are Muslims that are like that but also talk about how despite the main character being Muslim, the antagonists are as well can help to rid a single story. Books that are anti-religion, such as The Golden Compass, where they question the existence and the strength of the God, then read books that might put a good light of religions as well can provide broader stories as well. By doing this you can balance all religious based text and non-religious to show how each one views the world. As a teacher you don’t know what faith your students might have. So, by letting them read different books and seeing all sides it could help prevent bullying in the schools because the students understand the differing faiths better. You can base an entire class then on a big picture question of “what is religion” and use books such as The Golden Compass, Kite Runner, and Beyond the Burning Times (so you have a nonfiction book in the mix) that discusses multiple faiths in the world. Although it would be impossible to cover all faiths, you can cover the big ones out there and create Socratic discussions where all students can be comfortable to talk about the books. They