Banning Books: Most Americans Say NO!

It may not be obvious to some but I am a big fan of books (my most recent book review) and I am really not a big fan of banning books (here, here, and here). It is for these reasons I like to stay up on how people view the banning of books from public libraries. That is why I was glad to see this poll by Harris today that says most Americans do not support the banning of books in any way.

Banning or censoring books has been debated for years. A new Harris Poll shows, however, that a majority of Americans think no books should be banned completely (56%) while fewer than one in five say there are books which should be banned (18%); a quarter are not at all sure (26%). The older and less educated people are, the more likely they are to say that there are some books which should be banned completely. Opinions on banning books are linked to political philosophy: almost three quarters of Liberals (73%) say no books should be banned, compared to six in ten Moderates (60%) but only two in five Conservatives (41%) who say no books should be banned.

This is a really positive trend in my opinion. I don't feel that we should be banning access to any books from our children or even other adults our ability to access and share facts and opinions is what allows us to understand each other and our pasts. The most interesting trend is the way people view religious and, in the case of evolution, science works.

While few Americans think that there are books which should be banned completely, opinions differ on books that should be available to children in school libraries. Strong majorities say that children should be able to get The Holy Bible (83%) and books that discuss evolution (76%) from school libraries. Majorities also say so for other religious texts such as the Torah or Talmud (59%) and the Koran (57%), but approximately a quarter say these texts should not be available (24% and 28%, respectively) to children in school libraries.

A lot of this deals with people wanting their own specific religion to be viewed but not others but I was surprised that fewer people feel evolution books should be banned than feel the Torah should be. Look if you are going to have religious texts you should probably have them all so the state schools do not appear to be supporting one religion over another. Another thing is all of these books have had major influences on western civilization, both good and bad, and they should be available for students to understand why people who believe a certain thing believe it.

I was happy to see that only 16% of the people surveyed thought we should be banning books that discuss evolution. I don't know enough about the people to say for sure why they thought that way but at the very least it looks positive and looks like we are headed in the right direction and even if they feel that way for the wrong reasons at least getting students hands on real science could potentially lead to a better understanding of the science by the general public. Anyway let me end on one final note.

Banning books is bad, mkay! (it has been in my head since I started sorry)

Mapping Banned Books

So today is the last day of banned books week so I figured I should say something. I have posted in the past about books being banned so why didn't I mention this event at the start of the week? I have too much stuff to read for my current research and classes to have time to read a book, if it makes you feel better my research talks a lot about evolution so I am sure there are plenty of people who would have it banned if they could. The main point of this post was to point everyone to this map put together by the American Library Association (ALA), the group who supported this week. Enjoy and find out what books are being banned near you.

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.