The Pros And Cons Of Censoring Books

Laurie Halse Anderson once said “Censorship is the father of fear and the child of ignorance.” Censoring books isn’t helping anyone - so why do we do it? It’s not fair for someone to force their values on someone else. When books are censored, children have no say in what they read. Censorship takes away a person’s freedom in choosing which book is right for them.

Censoring books causes children to grow up with a closed mind. Allyson Casares, a teacher at Nicholson Elementary School in Crawfordsville, writes that “Parents… want children to remain innocent and unscarred, but death is a natural part of development… if parents try to "protect" their children, they might disturb their natural emotional development.” This statement just goes to

What doesn’t make sense, however, is trying to prevent everyone else from reading those books as well.” This statement shows that, although it makes sense for a parent to ban books, it doesn’t make sense for that parent to ban the book for everyone else. In fact, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll was banned because a considerable amount of individuals objected to the characters that were animals having the ability to use human language. Those people thought this put animals on the same level as humans - something so terrible the book had to be banned. Well, by that logic, we should ban The Giving Tree by Shel Silversteen. Oh, wait - we already did.

In today’s world, people are worried about what their children read. They comb through the world of literature and fight to abolish certain books from the list children can pick from. But if we keep prohibiting books, we’ll have no more left to read. As Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451, once said, “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit