Banned Books

                                                                                                                                             Skyla Lowe

                                                                                                                        808

Dear Ms.Berner,

            A banned book doesn’t give us teenagers the freedom to read because censorship is hiding the truth from us. Many parents are prejudiced as to what the school is exposing their teenaged children to read. Teenagers shouldn’t be told what books we can and cannot read, us students should be exposed to the explicit content in books if we are ready. Teen fiction can be dark but it shows us students that we aren’t alone if it can relate physically and mentally.

           

            Teenagers should have the right to read whatever they choose too because they should know the genre of books they can handle. Meghan Cox Gurdon a journalist from the article “How young adult fiction become to dark? stated “Contemporary literature has too much sex and violence, and our kids need to be protected from its “depravity”. This is not completely accurate for all books , some are exposing the content to help us. If students weren’t exposed to the explicit content then we wouldn’t be prepared to take in the conflicts that are going to occur as we grow into young adults. A teenaged blogger Emma said “Good literature rips open all the private parts of us--- the parts people like you have deemed to dark, inappropriate, grotesque or abnormal for teens to be feeling--- and then they stitch it all back together again before we even realize they’re not talking about us.” This dialogue Emma stated was very impactful because when us students read books we often realize that there’s an immediate connection to the protagonist and ourselves redeeming the inner us.

            As stated on nerdalert.com “banned books week encourages us to read” the student council feels as if we only get the freedom to read during the banned books week, which shouldn’t be the case. Many teenagers read for entertainment and education but when a teen does get interested in a book there is a high chance it has already been banned from the school.  Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury was a book that was banned in a Texas high school because of religious rituals says Diana Verm, a teen. Diana Verm stated “the burning of the bible shouldn’t be put in a book especially not for teens to read” while another teen Darrell Lee said “Fahrenheit 451 was a eye opener”.  The student council would highly disagree with Diana Verm because although it did go into religious valuables the book was trying to show that nothing or no one is different from another, everything should be equal and nothing should be unfair. Darrell Lee was also a teenager and he said it was apart of his English semester in high school to read Fahrenheit 451 and analyze as well as interpret what he felt the book had meant to him. Everyone views books differently based on their past knowledge. Nerdalert.com had said, “The Wizard of Oz by Jim Shore was banned because there were too many strong women.” No book should be banned because one gender has more power than the other, it may be there to show the reader the point trying to be reached.

            Some may say it is a good idea to ban books because in article Reading ‘can help reduce stress!  It talks about how reading relieves your stress and your heart rate tends to decrease. Us students can predict that if a student were to read a book that isn’t banned it will decrease their heart rate rather than a banned book that involves a lot of violence bringing their heart rate increasingly high.  Banned books can also “… dramatically shape the way Americans see the worlds economic, social, and political situations.” This is true because many books do secretly throw in real world situations in a way the reader wouldn’t grasp so easily as too someone who can easily read between the lines.

            To conclude, many books tend to explore tough and explicit context to teenagers because as the years go by more and more incidents become frequent and even more common, in these incidents many teenagers don’t seem to overcome the problems so easy because it was never exposed to them. If schools are going to ban books the most us students should be able to do is debate about the book being banned. Banning a book should be an individual thing meaning a student should be able to ask them selves if they’re mature and ready to read the book. Banning books doesn’t give students another fundamental way to learn and broaden their vocabulary and thinking’s in life.