Banning Books In Schools

Banning books isn’t uncommon. Books can be banned for many reasons such as violence, sexual content, or just plain “garbage”. It’s understandable that some things should be censored when it comes to children since everything they take in is absorbed. Where the line is drawn is banning books to the public. In some cases, books have been banned from public libraries. People should be able to read what they want since it is their living and it doesn’t involve others. Now when teaching in schools it is also understandable to censor books from their library but to a certain extent. Censoring in elementary and junior high is common, but high school students should be treated more and more like young adults. The big controversy going around is that

The media in this day and age is filled with violence, tragedy, death, etc. From the news to what is broadcasted on the internet, television, magazines there is not as much censorship to prevent everyone from not seeing what happens every day. Banning a book “sends a message to [students] that there is something wrong with reading- that we don’t want them to read this book because there’s something in it that we don’t want them to know” (qdi CPS). Even the author herself stated this about her graphic novel, “It’s a drawing and its one frame… I don’t think kids …have not seen any sign of violence… they see all kinds of things in cinema and the internet. It’s a black and white drawing and I’m not showing something extremely horrible” (Marjane). Even going through the novel myself, I couldn’t find a reason why the pictures themselves were anything too risky. Yes, we see depictions of torture but never once do we see an ounce of blood or anything that is considered horrific. It is something that even looking at history text books you can’t really compare. History text book have twice as graphic depictions and this is taught as far back as junior high