- Position‹2 of 3›
- Yes, schools should be able to ban books
- Argument‹2 of 2
Children should not read about mature content
Children should not be exposed to topics such as substance abuse, violence, and sex at a young age.
The argument
Proponents of school book bans argue that removal is a form of age-appropriate protection rather than censorship. Children reach a given school year at different stages of emotional development, and some texts contain graphic content that a particular reader may not be mature enough for. On this account the harm is not abstract: material of that kind could be traumatizing and disturbing to a child's mental health, and once read it cannot be unread. A school that controls which books sit on its shelves is, in this view, exercising the same judgement it already exercises over the rest of the curriculum. The second claim concerns modelling rather than distress. Proponents hold that books can also promote violence and substance use by presenting them through a character the reader follows sympathetically. If a character in a novel is acting violently, the reasoning goes, readers observe and learn that behaviour, much as they are thought to learn from behaviour they observe elsewhere. The mechanism is imitation, so the risk is held to rise with a reader's youth and with how closely the narrative invites identification. The example offered is J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, which popular accounts have long linked to acts of violence against public figures — including the killing of John Lennon and the attempt on Ronald Reagan's life. Proponents cite that association as evidence that a novel's influence on an unstable reader can extend beyond the page, though the link is a claim made about those cases rather than a finding established in them. From these claims the position concludes that schools should be able to ban books: where a title risks traumatizing younger readers or modelling violence for them, the school is entitled to keep it off its shelves.
Premises
Counter-arguments
Children should have the option to read mature content so they are not sheltered from lifelike situations. Reading about these situations is a safe way to learn about them but to not be put into harm's way. Mature content in literature can also better equip children to handle difficult situations that they read about. They are prepared and have learned from the successes and mistakes of the characters.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P4] Sheltering children from the realities of life is not helpful.