Blog 47 A Return to the Issue of Banned Books

 

With the reader’s indulgence, I’d like to return to the central issue of last month’s blog – book banning. As a resident of Virginia, I believe Governor Glenn Youngkin serendipitously latched onto an issue that carried him to the governorship, i.e. parental involvement in the public education of their children. The upside has been exactly that – parents seeking increased awareness of what their children are being taught. Of a concern (my opinion), a vocal group of parents protesting specific books found in school libraries relative to content of which they disapproved, have pressed to have those books banned. The books in question appear most often to have addressed issues related to sex, race or LGBTQ life. My sense: More often than not, the material objected to has been separated from a more complete contextual understanding.

Am I questioning the sincerity of parental concern in these matters? I am not. Do I fear a good, if misguided, intention gone awry? As I stated in my last blog, I do not believe banning a book is the answer to valid parental concern. Unless a child’s mind has been adulterated by the “adults” in charge of his or her development (all too common, I fear) or unbalanced by a genetic flaw or environmental injury (rare to my knowledge), I believe this recent uptick in concern that a particular book will warp a healthy child’s mind is imbedded in adult fear and its co-rider, ignorance.

As I did in the previous blog, permit me to use myself as an example of a legitimate concern distorted by ignorance. In my professional career, I was a Clinical Psychologist, a believer in knowledge gleaned from, among many things, hundreds of books I devoured. And yet, I fell prey, in a way, to this issue, allowing concern and ignorance lead me to make comments to my son in his early teens regarding his love for and pursuit of science fiction. For years, he’d read voraciously, but narrowly as it appeared to me. I pressed him to broaden his reading experience. In subsequent years, I was humbled to learn what a broad and deep swath of learning he’d extracted solely from sci-fi, including ideas about sex, race and the necessity of living with others different from him.

Coupled with my embarrassing admission that I’d avoided science fiction as a reading interest and therefore had rendered myself ignorant of it, I’d committed the same error in prejudgment I’m writing about here. Concern without knowledge could be a starting point leading to an option to educate oneself. Conversely, concern leading to emotional reaction without knowledge would seem premature at best, subject to diminishing parental effectiveness or worse.

So then, what is one to do when faced with a valid concern regarding the books our children might read? I do not believe the answer is to begin banning books. Beyond ourselves and teachers as sources for discussion about books our children read, one option I’d like to reiterate is to turn to the members of our society we’ve educated and trained to curate the books our children are exposed to for direction – our librarians. They can either appropriately guide us to the reading experiences we seek or to materials that offer in-depth reviews of the books we’re concerned about. When in doubt, let’s put our heads together with them.