Schools Should NOT Ban Books

"'Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight,'" Stephen Chbosky, author of The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Book banning occurs all of the time in thousands of different schools, in hundreds of different countries all around the world. Take The Scarlet Letter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne for example. The story has been called both 'pornographic' and 'obscene,' (buzzfeed.com) although it contains no sexual interactions or sexual language. Secondly, the story The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger has been banned from schools because it is ostensibly "unacceptable, obscene, blasphemous, negative, foul, filthy, and undermines morality," (bannedbookweeks.org) although it is one of the classic stories that make up American Literature today. Lastly, The Odyssey, by Homer has been banned in schools across the country because it contains sexual scenes, even considering it is a highly educational and classic story. Because of this information, one can conclude that school districts should not have the right or power to ban and/or alter original texts.

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne is a story of a young, pregnant girl named Hester Prynne who is forced by fellow townspeople of her small, Puritan town to wear the letter "A" for adultery on the breast of her gown. Considering that Prynne was impregnated out of wedlock, the story has been called both "pornographic" and "obscene" (buzzfeed.com) although there is no sexual interaction in the book. The story by no means encourages sexual interaction out of wedlock or any other obscene material, and is a part of the history and coming-to-be of American Literature. If the classic were to be altered, it...

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...pic which educates students in Greek mythology and Greek history.

The Scarlet Letter, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Odyssey have all been banned for reasons such as being religiously bias, to being too sexual for students to read in the classroom. Many other classical stories (such as The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin, The Great Gatsby, and The Grapes of Wrath) have banned for other absurd reasons similar to these. Banning the classics that make up American Literature takes away from the education that students access in the classroom, and less exposes students to the diamonds and the rough of the world today. The Scarlet Letter, The Catcher in the Rye, and The Odyssey are all classic stories that educate students about life and death, and everything in between. Therefore, school districts should not have the power or right to ban and/or alter ANY original texts.