What's black and white and read all over and designed to corrupt your teenager? Yes, it seems we've learned nothing since the days of the Salman Rushdie bonfires. A high school in Dallas, Texas, has banned a bunch of books after parents flagged inappropriate passages.
What was so offensive about the books, anyway, that it sent Highland Park High School parents in a tizzy? Well, of the 23 blacklisted, Nobel- and Pulitzer Prize-winning books, one had "strong language" (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie), one featured "sexual situations" (An Abundance of Katherines, by John Green), and one depicted Buddhist tenets and non-married intercourse (Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse). Because, of course, teens today are so pure of mind and heart, they have never come across sexual situations or strong language.
Fiction—and fresh, modern fiction at that—stretches the minds of high schoolers. I vividly remember reading Catcher in the Rye and some early Margaret Atwood when I was around 14, and it was literally life changing. Books enrich our lives and expand our grasp of morality. Teenagers, I would argue, are old enough to be challenged and moved by literature, assuming they have a good English teacher and the books in question aren't straight-up smut.
Censorship is the only crime here; robbing kids of a golden learning opportunity is deplorable.
“What I worry is that in order to protect [students], we may be taking away the tools they need to protect themselves later on,” said Jeanette Walls, author of The Glass Castle, also culled because the memoir deals with abuse and poverty.
Many parents insisted the school return to the classics, because, of course, classics don't have dark themes—and they are by and large written by white men, so that makes it OK.
Thank you, Highland Park High School, for providing me with an extensive and exciting reading list!
You tell me: do any of these books deserve to be banned, or are teenagers old enough to read what they please?
You won't believe which "classic" was deemed pornographic.
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