Banning Books In Schools

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Books have been a part of history for 5000 years; in this time we’ve been using them to learn, teach, express, and give people experience that maybe mind alternating. Books are such an indispensable part of human development both in the sense of human evolution and the sense of an individual human’s growth. However, in recent years the act of banning books for “unsuitable” or “foul” language would be committing a disservice for the student body’s education; and for a school to deprive the student of said need is to fail of the main purpose a school is to serve. ”Foul” language is an essential literary tool for the dialect of certain books, but if censored, the lessons that could be taught from said books is lost. Along with this cutting out …show more content…

English is a complex medium that has been done, taught, and perfected for centuries, and it’s been understood that the art of writing itself is home to a multitude of different styles, vocabulary, themes, etc. It’s also been understood that when writing, especially a narrative style fiction, that characterization and every word the characters speak is essential to the stories. With the books in question, there is, no denial that the “inappropriate” words in question are present in the stories most often banned; but the words are more often than not either taken out of context or judged unfairly by today’s societal standard. One of the frequently banned books, The Adventure of Huckleberry Finn is both banned and know for its semi-frequent use of the word, nigger. The main character, and others, usually use this word to refer to the slave character of Jim.While the word is used, it serves a purpose, this purpose being mainly to establish Finn’s character and establish society’s state of mind, for example, “It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger; but I done it, and I warn't ever sorry for it …show more content…

More often than not the argument goes along the lines of the book’s language are unnecessary and ruin a child’s innocence. One mother complains, “I’m very disappointed in the whole system,” McCall-Strehlow said Thursday. “A school is a place where children are supposed to be safe, but the material being read isn’t safe content.”(Osbourne) In this statement, the idea of the books being “not safe” really only presents one-two, not vague ideas one being that books will attack you physically, or two is that the phrases, words, and scenes will traumatize the students. Undoubtedly the first one is false so that only provides us with the second option. Suggesting that just reading about slavery or curse words traumatizes someone is strange; as previously mentioned the parents would have to know that the words in questions are bad, and they’re stable enough to raise and provide for a child and hover over their child’s reading material, how are they not traumatized or depressed? Other common arguments can be found in quotes such as, “We're validating that these words are acceptable. They are not acceptable," she said. "We will lose our children if we continue to say that this is OK, that we validate these words when we should not."(Schaub) The book at the center point of this particular article was Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird because of its use of racial slurs such as Nigger gets the book

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