- Position1 of 3›
- No, schools should not be able to ban books
Society has become far more interconnected, multicultural, and plural since the practice of book burning first began. Because of this, there is no need for censorship given our commitment to understanding and embracing content that is foreign to us and reflects different beliefs than we have.
The argument
The argument here is historical: book banning is treated not as a policy to be weighed on its merits but as the survival of a practice whose original rationale has long since lapsed. Books began to be banned in the United States around the Civil War era, and the prohibitions of that period were aimed strictly at material containing pornographic content. Whatever one makes of that standard, it belonged to a society with a particular and narrow sense of what could be published at all. Since then, the country has matured, and what it tolerates has changed accordingly. Mature and graphic content circulates widely and is accepted as a normal part of the culture, in books as in every other medium. A restriction devised for a public that would not countenance such material is being applied to a public that encounters it routinely elsewhere, which means the ban no longer performs the function it was designed for — it merely withholds from students in a classroom what is unremarkable everywhere outside it. The second objection concerns whose standards the practice preserves. Restricting literature follows a historical custom of catering to the white upper class, whose tastes and sensibilities set the terms of what counted as suitable. That constituency is not the constituency of a modern American school, and a standard inherited from it does not reflect the diversity that exists in the country today. Selecting the permissible books by reference to it means shaping a contemporary classroom around a century-old idea of who its readers are. Encouraging children to read various types of books, by contrast, reflects the world as it actually is, rather than reverting to outdated opinions and practices. Because banning school books is an outdated practice in this sense, schools should not be able to ban books.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Books continue to be banned and challenged today, so the practice is not outdated. Instead the reasons books are banned, such as violence, satanism, and sexual content, reflect the change of time and society. Instead of no longer prohibiting literature, the reasons for the prohibition have evolved to reflect current times.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The first book banned on a national scale in the US was about slavery.