Banning of Books

            There are many books that throughout the year’s public schools have decided to ban these books for reasons like language, general offensiveness, sexual content, witchcraft, and many other reasons. Generally, the books that are being banned by schools are known to be the ‘classical’ literature books like the Great Gatsby, the Catcher and the Rye, Fahrenheit 451, the Scarlet Letter, and just a lot of books that language arts classes usually read. Why shouldn’t schools be able to ban these books?

            Language arts classes are all about reading, writing, speech; which is just language in general. They focus upon books that are written a certain way that makes the books popular for the theme, language, and style of the books. So why are certain schools banning these books when a lot of language arts classes focus upon them? Because of how it’s written is usually why schools ban certain books; which is kind of ironic since language arts teachers make their students read the books because of how it’s written, but anyway since many of these ‘classical’ or older books have inappropriate language or have sexual mentioning’s in them they get banned from some schools.

            The banning of these books is significant because it’s changing the curriculum of the language arts teachers since they can’t use books like these since they are inappropriate for students. Though, public schools (in turn the government) do have the right to ban books at schools, they shouldn’t. The reason they shouldn’t is because first off especially in high school, the teenagers have already been exposed to content and everything else that is far worse than some of these books. The second reason is that students learn from the books, like in the Pride and Prejudice and Of Mice and Men, the students can learn about discrimination and judging others.

The significance of this is that since the students are learning, so teachers should be able to choose whether or not they want a book like that in their curriculum, the drawback to adding these books though is that it may be considered inappropriate, but the students will end up being exposed to concepts in the books eventually anyway. By banning different books it will just make the students more interested in topics that are banned and they may eventually read it, so by banning books they’re sparking the inevitable and basically drawing attention to books that are bad enough to be banned at school.

            Schools shouldn’t ban books because of it being considered inappropriate at school, the students learn from them. Though, some books like Harry Potter may not seem at first to have any learning from them, all books you can learn from. So even the books about witchcraft shouldn’t be banned from schools because students may read it whether the schools provides the books for them or not, so why not just allow the books at schools in the first place? Books are a great way to learn, even in classes like Ap Biology they go into major detail about sex, so guess that means teachers aren’t allowed to teach about that either. The point it just because there may be a book that has something a little ‘bad’ in it, it shouldn’t be banned from school. For more information about the banning of books check out http://www.ala.org/bbooks/about