Banned Books Week - question

[heiditandy]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "spinelli372003" 
<spin01 at a...> wrote:
> I think we are going to have to agree to disagree on this.  I do 
not 
> agree with books being banned.  At all in any way shape or form.  
I 
> do however think that a parent is ultimately responsible for a 
childs 
> reading material.


Sherry - what age group are you defining as a child? Are you 
thinking of 8 year olds? 12 year olds? 16 year olds? They're all 
children, as a matter of law and as a matter of policy in every 
single school in the US (unless they've been emancipated, which is 
very rare), but should a parent have the same ability to restrict 
the reading material of a 16 year old as of an 8 year old? 

I'm speaking here, btw, as a mom of a 5 year old who's "read" via 
audiotape the first three Harry Potter books, as well as Charlotte's 
Web and every Magic Treehouse and Magic Schoolhouse book - he 
prefers me to read to him, but if he wanted to read on his own, 
there is not one book that I would hold off limits to him. But then 
again, I know there is evidence to support the argument I have made, 
that words have a different type of impact on a reader than images 
do - there are certainly many, many types of images I would not let 
him see!

And I'm also speaking as someone who's been a manic bibliophile 
since I was four - by the time I was six, I'd read Little Women and 
at eight, I'd read some Shakespeare - I read Mein Kampf in class 
when I was ten, but I'd known about the Holocaust since I was 
probably six, if not before. 

I think it is *very* important for a parent to know what his or her 
child (read: under 11) is reading, and to accompany one's child to 
the library and/or bookstore, and yes, I think it's appropriate for 
parents to guide their younger children to age-appropriate books, 
but by that, I mean things like theme rather than the complexity of 
language. But I also think that abrogating that responsibility to 
the school, to allow books to be removed from the shelves in a 
library like the one in my son's school, which has to cater to kids 
from four to coming on thirteen, is a cruel, harsh and censorious 
way of controlling the community. 

The ALA agrees that children should not be required to read books 
that the parent considers inapropriate; they say as much on their 
website. Why should one parent, or a dozen parents, be able to say 
that no child in a school should read *any* book? Who gives them the 
right?

Heidi