Expelling Huck Finn Argumentative Essay

The First Amendment was written with the intention of giving everyone in the United States the right to freedom of expression. This intention will not be fully met as long as parents and other adults feel the need to censor and control what children read, say, and do. Should children have full First Amendment rights, or should they have a more limited form of the First Amendment? Nat Hentoff, a free-speech activist and historian, Janet Judge, president of Sports Law Associates LLC, and Simon Brown, Assistant Director of Communications at Americans United for Separation of Church and State, are all prominent figures in the argument of children’s First Amendment rights. Hentoff argues that classical literature containing racist remarks should

He counters the NAACP’s claim, asserting that students can tell that the novel is about anti-racism. Hentoff defends his assertion by reflecting on a conversation he had with a group of African American eighth grade students who had been studying the novel and its historical background; they said that they “‘know the difference between a racist book and an anti-racist book’” (98). This means that with proper education on the history of racism, students are perfectly able to absorb the valuable messages in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He then points to a 1998 lawsuit that was aimed at removing Huck Finn from compulsory reading lists; the judge made the point that “‘a necessary component of any education is learning to think critically about offensive ideas,’” meaning that students would not have a complete education without reading the novel (Hentoff 99). This example alludes to his overarching claim that without education on the history of racism, students could be doomed to repeat the same racist mistakes in the