THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, September 11, 1996 TAG: 9609110002
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Opinion
SOURCE: By LEILA CHRISTENBURY
LENGTH: 86 lines
The recent People for the American Way report, detailing a significant rise in censorship attempts on books in public schools (a record 475 times this past school year), should surprise few. The concern that certain books are considered dangerous and should be kept out of young people's hands is an old one.
Plato argued in ``The Republic'' that poets and dramatists, who did not always adhere to the truth, be banished from his Utopian society. In 1615, Thomas Hobbes advocated in ``The Leviathan'' that the state should censor for the good of the people. Today, in this country, the American Library Association continues its yearly ``celebration'' of Banned Books Week detailing the many books which have been challenged or even removed from libraries and classrooms.
Yet beyond the usual debate about censorship, what is particularly fascinating about the recent People for the American Way report is what has made the list of the 12 ``most frequently challenged books in public schools.'' A number of the titles are famous and recognizable books, many written primarily for adults (The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Native Son, Of Mice and Men, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Color Purple, The Catcher in the Rye). The other half, however, are young-adult books, a genre of literature written for and marketed to young people in middle and high schools.
Some of these books may not be familiar to adult readers, but it is important to note that all of them are written by recognized and much-praised authors in the young-adult-literature field. More to the point, the works are ethical, thoughtful and thought-provoking, just the kind of literature that one would assume any concerned parent or teacher would want a young person to spend time reading.
These books are good literature. These books are also moral to their core, and the deep irony is that they are appearing on a banned-books list. Let's take a look at some of the titles.
Lois Lowry's The Giver (winner of the prestigious Newbery Award) is both fantasy and science fiction. Compelling, written in a spare style, the novel convincingly demonstrates the drawbacks to a controlled, monitored society (albeit a completely painless and anxiety-free one), questioning whether such a futuristic ideal is ultimately humane or even human.
Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War is a highly praised, tightly plotted, realistic novel that takes place in a boys' high school. What starts out as an innocent selling of chocolates to raise money for the school becomes a titanic confrontation between good and evil where one brave young person refuses, at his peril, to go along with the crowd and mindlessly conform.
Go Ask Alice, a continuing best seller, stands as one of the most-effective (and anonymous) anti-drug novels ever written in this country, giving young readers a harrowing portrait of a drug user and, by example, almost every reason imaginable not to do drugs.
Bridge to Terabithia (another Newbery Award winner) by Katherine Paterson presents a believable, nonsexual friendship between a boy and girl and seriously considers questions of family relations, spiritual belief, death and the afterlife.
The Colliers' My Brother Sam Is Dead, also a Newbery Honor book, is a fine example of historical fiction, giving a dramatic, memorable picture of the Revolutionary War and its effects upon real people.
Finally, Robert Newton Peck's A Day No Pigs Would Die is a much-praised portrait of a rural, poor farm family and the love a young boy feels for his embattled father.
Aren't these the kind of books we want young people to read? Aren't these the kinds of issues we want young people to think about? Aren't the moral questions these books raise important for our students and for our children? Why are we challenging these books in school instead of putting them - jamming them - into every young person's hands?
Perhaps we need to remember the words of John Milton, a 17th-century poet and writer whose major concern was God, man and salvation. Along with his deep religious beliefs, Milton was also one of the first and certainly most famous of Western civilization's censorship warriors, and he fought the suppression of books in England. He wrote in 1644, in the famous anti-censorship statement, ``Areopagitica.''
``As good almost kill a man as kill a good book: who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's Image: but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the Image of God, as it were, in the eye.''
These books are good books. Let's not kill them. Let's not ban them. Let's reconsider what these books are actually saying and doing, and make sure they are in the hands of our young people - which is where they most surely belong. MEMO: Leila Christenbury is professor of English education at Virginia
Commonwealth University in Richmond. She is the editor of English
Journal and Books for You and is a national authority on young adult
literature. by CNB