Banned Books & Censorship
Here, at the beginning of everything, I must make a confession: I am no longer going to be an educator.
The choice to go into English education was never a choice made in the throes of passion for me. Everyone had always told me since as long as I've been in school: "You would be a good teacher. You're a great public speaker. You should go into education."
But as the years and education classes went on... I sensed a kind of hollowness to everything I did, an emptiness that echoed through my classes and work.
I realized (far too late as it were) that deep down inside, I didn't really want to be an educator. It was just something that I was good at... not something that I wanted to do.
So I changed the emphasis on my English major to literature instead of secondary education. I found that I then had two classes I needed to drop that had no benefit to fulfilling my major. One was teaching ESL, and the other was teaching lit to adolescents. Since I did have an interest in literature and I enjoyed the lit discussions in class, I decided to keep the teaching lit. and drop the other.
That being said, the class (and this blogg) have been an exercise in will-power. It almost feels a bit like living a lie... sitting in class pretending to be a future educator... joining discussion as if I was interested, as if I were making mental notes about future lesson plans when really I wasn't. It was almost the same empty feeling I had when I was going into teaching, only this time, I knew I was living the lie.
Hence, picking a topic for the blogg was difficult. I eventually settled on Banned Books & Censorship frankly because I counted on the media to give my RSS feed ample material to write on... but more so, I felt that censorship was an issue that could be taken out of the educator position and replayed in the parent situation. I think about these articles, then, not as a potential educator, but as a potential parent with a child in the education system. What books would I allow my child to read? What educational practices do I agree with? How can I use this class, blogg, and experience to gain the perspective of teachers to use when someday I may be a parent?
I set up my Google Reader to browse the New York Times and the Washington Post with respect to educational topics, counting on the fact that censorship, protest, and book banning were topics that the reporting community would cover... and I was not too far off the mark. Though not abounding with stories, the two feeds did give me a good number to select from... if nothing else, a good number to fulfill the required quota of the Blogg.
I also subscribed to a couple of Google's specific groups as "About Literature: Classic" and "Powell's Banned Books" for material. Although these haven't been as fruitful as the others, they occasionally come through with a good article or two.
Finally, I set up the feed to search the news database with specific terms in mind, like "of mice and men" "banned book school*" and other searches for controversial authors such as Angelou and Orwell.
By keeping my searches very general as I do, I find a wide variety of things to comment on, (hopefully) keeping the blogg interesting.
Censorship is important to me because I believe very strongly in experience being the best teacher. You can tell a young child as many times as you like not to touch a hot stove because it will burn them... but until that child touches the stove and gets burned, he/she will not truly know or understand why not to touch it.
Thus, we all learn vicariously. Survival necessitates it. The reason I don't snort cocaine is because I've heard the stories of the people who's lives it has ruined. Do I need to snort cocaine to be able to tell if it's a good thing or a bad thing? No. Most everyone would agree that snorting cocaine isn't a good thing. But experience offers a variety of perceptions. Sigmund Freud himself was an avid user and supporter of cocaine. Was he wrong? Or did his experience offer him a different perspective. To be speculative, perhaps there really is a third-eye which psychedelic drugs can unlock for all of us, and we're really just missing out. Timothy Leary would have us think so... and who are you to refute his point having never taken such drugs yourself (presumably)?
What I'm getting at here is that no matter how much science would like us to believe that the world is now empirically defined and ordered... every individual operates on a faith. Faith in the trustworthiness of doctors and researchers... faith in the accuracy of historians... faith in the scribes of religious texts... faith in the stories of ancestors... When all the events of the entire world are taken into consideration, your life may actually empirically touch only 20% of what you believe you actually experience.
Therefore, the experience, perspective, and opinions of others are all incredibly important. We see only 20% of the world with our actual eyes. The rest we read, we hear, we come to know vicariously. Do you know what the holocaust was? Did it actually happen? How do you know it actually happened? Have you personally talked to a survivor? Have you gone and visited a death camp? No, you read about it, you heard about it.
Perceptions, most importantly through words, are our doorways into experience, our windows into knowledge. And when someone says that some doorways should be nailed shut, that some windows must be boarded up and sealed away, it is a VERY serious matter... Especially when the same doors and windows offer to some people the experience of beauty.
When a book or piece of artwork is banned we loose a part of our perspective... we loose a part of the collective human experience. True, it may be ugly, or disgusting, or vile, and we would love to deny it ever existed... but it's still there whether we want it or not. People lie and kill... they murder and they rape and curse and are violent... they have sex they take drugs. And no matter how adamantly you tell your children or your friends that such things don't happen... a thousand things even worse than that will happen during the course of your conversation.
Books as a form of art show us what we love and what we hate and we need them BOTH... because of one single thing:
Understanding.
We need to understand why we love what we love and why we hate what we hate. If a mother finds "How to Kill a Mockingbird" offensive, she needs to understand WHY it's offensive and then TEACH THAT TO HER CHILDREN. Pass on values.
Man has always been terrified of what he does not know, what he does not UNDERSTAND. We destroy what we don't understand, and oftentimes (and sadly only much after the fact) do we see that what we destroyed in the name of ignorance is what we should have examined in the name of understanding.
Censorship is dangerous because it can create and perpetuate the destructive power of ignorance. Before we remove a perspective from our society, we must first concretely understand WHY we demand such removal... why one thing is horrible and another is useful... why we destroy pedophilic material and teach chapter 12 of "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings".
Censorship is important to me because it can advance us, not only as a society, but as a race and species... while simultaneously having the power to make us slide further down the ladder of social evolution we try so desperately to climb. And that is why I address it here.
The choice to go into English education was never a choice made in the throes of passion for me. Everyone had always told me since as long as I've been in school: "You would be a good teacher. You're a great public speaker. You should go into education."
But as the years and education classes went on... I sensed a kind of hollowness to everything I did, an emptiness that echoed through my classes and work.
I realized (far too late as it were) that deep down inside, I didn't really want to be an educator. It was just something that I was good at... not something that I wanted to do.
So I changed the emphasis on my English major to literature instead of secondary education. I found that I then had two classes I needed to drop that had no benefit to fulfilling my major. One was teaching ESL, and the other was teaching lit to adolescents. Since I did have an interest in literature and I enjoyed the lit discussions in class, I decided to keep the teaching lit. and drop the other.
That being said, the class (and this blogg) have been an exercise in will-power. It almost feels a bit like living a lie... sitting in class pretending to be a future educator... joining discussion as if I was interested, as if I were making mental notes about future lesson plans when really I wasn't. It was almost the same empty feeling I had when I was going into teaching, only this time, I knew I was living the lie.
Hence, picking a topic for the blogg was difficult. I eventually settled on Banned Books & Censorship frankly because I counted on the media to give my RSS feed ample material to write on... but more so, I felt that censorship was an issue that could be taken out of the educator position and replayed in the parent situation. I think about these articles, then, not as a potential educator, but as a potential parent with a child in the education system. What books would I allow my child to read? What educational practices do I agree with? How can I use this class, blogg, and experience to gain the perspective of teachers to use when someday I may be a parent?
I set up my Google Reader to browse the New York Times and the Washington Post with respect to educational topics, counting on the fact that censorship, protest, and book banning were topics that the reporting community would cover... and I was not too far off the mark. Though not abounding with stories, the two feeds did give me a good number to select from... if nothing else, a good number to fulfill the required quota of the Blogg.
I also subscribed to a couple of Google's specific groups as "About Literature: Classic" and "Powell's Banned Books" for material. Although these haven't been as fruitful as the others, they occasionally come through with a good article or two.
Finally, I set up the feed to search the news database with specific terms in mind, like "of mice and men" "banned book school*" and other searches for controversial authors such as Angelou and Orwell.
By keeping my searches very general as I do, I find a wide variety of things to comment on, (hopefully) keeping the blogg interesting.
Censorship is important to me because I believe very strongly in experience being the best teacher. You can tell a young child as many times as you like not to touch a hot stove because it will burn them... but until that child touches the stove and gets burned, he/she will not truly know or understand why not to touch it.
Thus, we all learn vicariously. Survival necessitates it. The reason I don't snort cocaine is because I've heard the stories of the people who's lives it has ruined. Do I need to snort cocaine to be able to tell if it's a good thing or a bad thing? No. Most everyone would agree that snorting cocaine isn't a good thing. But experience offers a variety of perceptions. Sigmund Freud himself was an avid user and supporter of cocaine. Was he wrong? Or did his experience offer him a different perspective. To be speculative, perhaps there really is a third-eye which psychedelic drugs can unlock for all of us, and we're really just missing out. Timothy Leary would have us think so... and who are you to refute his point having never taken such drugs yourself (presumably)?
What I'm getting at here is that no matter how much science would like us to believe that the world is now empirically defined and ordered... every individual operates on a faith. Faith in the trustworthiness of doctors and researchers... faith in the accuracy of historians... faith in the scribes of religious texts... faith in the stories of ancestors... When all the events of the entire world are taken into consideration, your life may actually empirically touch only 20% of what you believe you actually experience.
Therefore, the experience, perspective, and opinions of others are all incredibly important. We see only 20% of the world with our actual eyes. The rest we read, we hear, we come to know vicariously. Do you know what the holocaust was? Did it actually happen? How do you know it actually happened? Have you personally talked to a survivor? Have you gone and visited a death camp? No, you read about it, you heard about it.
Perceptions, most importantly through words, are our doorways into experience, our windows into knowledge. And when someone says that some doorways should be nailed shut, that some windows must be boarded up and sealed away, it is a VERY serious matter... Especially when the same doors and windows offer to some people the experience of beauty.
When a book or piece of artwork is banned we loose a part of our perspective... we loose a part of the collective human experience. True, it may be ugly, or disgusting, or vile, and we would love to deny it ever existed... but it's still there whether we want it or not. People lie and kill... they murder and they rape and curse and are violent... they have sex they take drugs. And no matter how adamantly you tell your children or your friends that such things don't happen... a thousand things even worse than that will happen during the course of your conversation.
Books as a form of art show us what we love and what we hate and we need them BOTH... because of one single thing:
Understanding.
We need to understand why we love what we love and why we hate what we hate. If a mother finds "How to Kill a Mockingbird" offensive, she needs to understand WHY it's offensive and then TEACH THAT TO HER CHILDREN. Pass on values.
Man has always been terrified of what he does not know, what he does not UNDERSTAND. We destroy what we don't understand, and oftentimes (and sadly only much after the fact) do we see that what we destroyed in the name of ignorance is what we should have examined in the name of understanding.
Censorship is dangerous because it can create and perpetuate the destructive power of ignorance. Before we remove a perspective from our society, we must first concretely understand WHY we demand such removal... why one thing is horrible and another is useful... why we destroy pedophilic material and teach chapter 12 of "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings".
Censorship is important to me because it can advance us, not only as a society, but as a race and species... while simultaneously having the power to make us slide further down the ladder of social evolution we try so desperately to climb. And that is why I address it here.
posted by D. Calkins at
9:21 AM
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