One more time

Ok so I promise I will eventually get off of this book banning topic but I came across this today and after my last two posts (here and here) I figured I would pass this along. This comes to us from Amazon.com and it is a list of the most commonly banned books. The most common reasons for books being banned, at least by my count, are:

Profanity(12)
Sexual Situations/Nudity(10)
Teenage Situations(6)
Racism(5)

I don't know if the parents/teachers who made these complaints have ever walked through the halls of the middle and high school but all of these go down every day. You think you are protecting the kids from all of these no all you are doing is covering your eyes and not seeing what they are actually doing. By the time I was in high school I knew fellow students who had been sexually active, I also knew the better part of the swear words you can imagine. Sure I may not have used them at home or even much at school, yes I was that kid, but that doesn't mean that I hadn't already been exposed to them. As for the teenage situations, which is a very broad category and often includes the sexual situations, we all went through them. At the same time it wasn't something you always felt comfortable talking about with family, friends, or teachers. Reading that people had gone through similar things and had come out alright helped me get through all of them. Racism exists (yes even though Stephen Colbert said that it had ended with President Obama's election) today but most of these books are not even modern books. They date back in time and they show you the views that were held at the time of the writing of the book. This is important not just in the historical aspect of it but in order to help us learn from our mistakes. The reading of a book should not just be handing a kid a book and telling them to read it. It should include a background of what was going on at the time of writing and why the book was written, see banning books and Fahrenheit 451.

There are a couple more common themes that get books banned and a very common one is support of communism/socialism, this is something I have already written about (here) so I really don't feel that there is much more to say on that. Also a big theme is violence and death.

All of these themes are events that we deal with in a real life. All things we need to learn about. Books provide an opportunity to do that learning in our minds. When we see it on TV or in Movies we get the visual aspect. It doesn't give us an opportunity to learn from it or to think through what we would do in real life. With reading we can put ourselves in the situation but at the same time our brains recognize it as not real, where as sometimes it is more difficult with TV and movies, so we can see how it turns out in the book and realize that those decisions were good or bad.

Ok I will step off of my soap box now, although what is a blog if not a giant soap box, and will try to get back onto more sciency issues for my next blog post but I make no promises we won't be back to this issue at some time in the future.