Censorship in Public Schools

-A principal in a California high school bans five books written by Richard Brautigan
because he thinks they might contain "obscenities or offensive sexual references"
-A Vermont high school librarian is forced to resign because she fought the school
board's decision to remove Richard Price's The Wanderers, and to "restrict" the use of Stephen King's Carrie and Patrick Mann's Dog Day Afternoon.
-An Indiana school board takes action that leads to the burning of many copies of a
textbook (shades of the Nazis!) that deals with drugs and the sexual behavior of teenagers.

These cases of censorship in public schools are not unusual and there is evidence that such challenges are increasing. These challenges are actually typical of the ones being leveled against school libraries today. These challenges can come from one person or a group concerned with the suitability of the material in question. In almost every case, the effort to ban books is said to be "justified by fear of the harmful effects that the books may have on young children". The result of these censorship attempts has been two opposing sides: one side believes that "more suitable materials can usually be found from among the wealth of materials available on most subjects, and the other side believes that students' "intellectual freedom" can be upheld only if students are allowed to examine "any available relevant materials in order to gain the insights needed to reach their own conclusions". In the simplest terms, the debate is between censorship and the freedom to read.

The most important question when discussing censorship deals with its
constitutionality; does censorship violate the First Amendment's guarantee of free
speech? Censorship advocates actually use the words of the First Amendment to make
their point; "the amendment reads, 'Congress shall make no law...", it does not say,
"There shall be no law...'". They believe that, although the federal
government is forbidden to censor, it is not unconstitutional for states and local
communities to pass censorship laws. Also, since the US Supreme Court
does not believe the First Amendment protects all forms of expression (child
pornography, etc.), then proponents of censorship believe that censorship laws are
constitutional. Anti-censorship has the upper-hand, constitutionally, at least,
since "judges, from local courts to the Supreme Court, seem firmly on the anti-censorship side". The courts have time and again ruled that the Constitution prohibits Congress from censorship of any form.

These two opposing sides have butted heads again and again leaving behind
landmark cases for future legal actions. One of the most famous of those cases was Pico vs. Board of Education, Island Trees Union Free School District No. 26, which was the first school library censorship case to reach the Supreme Court. In March 1976, the Island Trees School Board in New York removed eleven books that they deemed "anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, and just plain filthy"
from the high school library shelves. Among these books were Slaughterhouse Five by
Kurt Vonnegut, A Hero Ain't Nothing but a Sandwich by Alice Childress, and Soul on Ice by Eldridge Cleaver. The board felt that it had "a moral obligation to protect
the children in our schools from this moral danger". Five students then sued
the school board on grounds that their decision violated their First Amendment rights.

The suit was passed around the courts until June 1982 when the Supreme Court took up the cause and ruled that the school board would have to defend its removal of the books. The Supreme Court decided that since the library is used voluntarily, they can choose books there freely and that, as Justice Brennan stated, "the First Amendment rights of students may be directly and sharply implicated by the removal of books from the shelves of a school library. The Supreme Court's decision was that "courts may act our of concern for the First Amendment rights of those affected by school officials' action". On August 12, 1982, the school board voted to put the books back on the shelves; (special note: the librarian was told to inform the parents of students who checked out those books).

The advocates of school library book censorship believe that adults must have
control over what children read. They feel that unless responsible adults oversee what students are reading, students will be exposed to the worst in literature. This literature can go from simply causing offense, to "resulting in emotional damage and even leading to anti-social behavior". Their beliefs lead them to pull the offending books from the shelves so that young readers are protected, as was the case in Pico and as was the case when "Robin Hood was considered communistic, Tarzan was living with Jane without benefit of clergy, and Huckleberry Finn was a racist". Each time they use words like controversial, filthy, immoral, lascivious, lewd, obscene, sacrilegious, and violent, they are actually using only one word, censorship.

The anti-censorship group believes that students have the same constitutional
freedoms as everyone else, including the right to read whatever they want. They feel that it is only in this way "that children can develop the taste and understanding to distinguish between trash and serious literature".
And it is with this group that I make my stand against censorship. The purpose of education remains what it has always been in a free society:
to develop a free and reasoning human being who can think for himself, who
understands his own and other cultures, who lives compassionately and
cooperatively with his fellow man, who respects both himself and others, who
has developed self-discipline and self-motivation, who can laugh at the world, and who can successfully develop survival strategies for existence in the world.