Don’t read this
Who holds the responsibility for what children read?
In my home province of Alberta, there is currently much discussion and action around the banning of certain books from school libraries, mostly in response to “explicit sexual content.” This has led to the removal of a number of books by order of the Minister of Education. In response to the Minister’s actions, there have been many voices arguing that such ministerial censorship is entirely inappropriate in a democracy that values freedom of expression.
As a retired educator, I find this notion that any and all forms of censorship are entirely wrong is odd, to say the least. Our whole educational enterprise is predicated on the belief that what children hear, see and read makes a difference to the persons they become. It has always been incumbent on the adult generation to select the influences that will affect children. The Bible clearly states that parents and the community of believers are responsible for nurturing children (Deut. 6:4-9 and Eph. 6:4), and that misleading children can have dire consequences for the adults who do so (Matt. 18:6, Mark 9:42, Luke 17:2). Thus, absolute freedom to read whatever is available is untenable on both moral and practical grounds.
What’s your criteria?
Thousands of titles of children’s literature are published every year in English. Even if it were wise to buy all of them (which it isn’t), such wholesale purchase is fiscally impossible. Schools must make selections, and to do so they must establish criteria in building classroom and library collections. Parents, too, have a responsibility to vet the appropriateness of the material their children read, especially as the summer holidays are now here, and reading books and magazines will, I hope, occupy at least some of our children’s holiday time.
As a long-time teacher educator, I was (and still am) pretty eclectic about what I think is appropriate for children to read. Certainly, literature that is blatantly pornographic, racist or that celebrates violence has no place in schools and the Christian life in general. But one must also be careful not to judge a literary work on superficial, moralistic grounds. The Bible, for example, includes many graphic accounts of sex and violence. Many heroic figures in the Old Testament are not the sort with whom we would want our children to “hang out.” Take David, for example. This “man after God’s own heart” was a murderer and adulterer with so much blood on his hands that he was forbidden to build the temple. Yet despite his grievous shortcomings, David loved God, confessed his sins, and was used by God as a link in the line of ancestry that led to Jesus’ birth.
Libraries must develop book selection policies, and both teachers and parents must learn to look beyond the surface and learn to probe the moral center of a piece of literature along with its literary integrity. More on how to do those things in my next column.
A comment about public libraries. . . . In my view, public libraries respect families. They order a large selection of books, some of which some families enjoy and others don’t. In regard to the children, libraries encourage parents to help select what is appropriate for their children.
I think it is the people who want to override the public libraries’ selection and challenge policies that are anti-family in that they don’t respect parents’ rights and duties to help guide their children through the endless possibilities.