Censorship: Friend or Foe?

Censorship: Friend or Foe? In response to the opinion that censorship is bad, children are impressionable. If a child reads a book and thinks that it sounds “cool” or “fun,” they’re going to try it. An anonymous speaker said “does anyone realize how stupid teens are getting?” If the books that they read are censored, there will be no worries of children trying to impersonate what they read because everything that could be harmful or hurtful is out of their reach. While some will make the argument that it depends on the maturity of a child, some children mature less quickly than others. There’s no way of telling who can handle the material until it’s too late. Censoring in the beginning is like a safety net to make sure nothing offensive is being said. On the other hand, a high school student should be mature enough to handle anything that is thrown their way. By the time they get to that age, they already know a good handful of the stuff that administrators are trying to censor. Offensive topics like racism, sexual contact, rape, and homosexuality may be contained in the book being read, but in all reality, there is nothing more real to the book than there is to a scary movie. President Obama said “censorship includes teaching our children the truth about history and this country, which is not currently done, since the education department is a tool of the Liberal and their revisionist history to convert our country into communist society.” Meaning censorship could be depriving children of the ability to learn about not only their country and government, as it seemingly being said here, but about the world and how it functions. As anyone could say, censorship is as easy a topic as politics or religion, there are so many different ways to look at it. In one hand there is the fact that some people are not mature enough to handle some of the points being made, and some of the things being said. While in the other hand, there is the fact that censoring a

Cited: 1.) http://www.riledup.com/debate/1090/should-high-school-libraries-censor-books-offered-to-the-students- Anonymous Author. 2.) http://www.ala.org/ala/issuesadvocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/challengedclassics/reasonsbannedindex.com- Doyle, Robert P. 3.) http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books.html- Anonymous Author. 4.) http://www.abffe.org/bbw-booklist-detailed.html- Anonymous Author. 5.) http://www.usd320.com/whs/lmc/bbooks.html- Anonymous Author.