It is censorship by others that most educators oppose. Such distasteful censorship -- the kind we don't like -- comes most often from government or a powerful ideological group. There are many such groups, some of which oppose either a positive or a negative representation of a long list of beliefs and lifestyles: humanism, communism, socialism, commercialism, racism, atheism, liberalism, materialism, Darwinism, intellectualism, modernism, sexuality, sensuality, homosexuality, spirituality, etc. Almost anyone opposes at least two of the listed "isms," and the list could be three times as long. There are opposition groups to every conceivable lifestyle, style of dress, and living arrangement.
Within the context of our numerous aversions, no one is universally tolerant. Individuals are, however, almost universally less tolerant of deviation for their children than they are for their friends, for other relatives, and even for themselves. We build a shelter for our children's ideas just as we do for their physical bodies, and if we are careful teachers and parents, we furnish it just as carefully. We select what we give our children to read, and in doing so, we become censors.
In fact, all of us who are involved with children practice some level of censorship, and most of us have a single reason. We know where we want the child to go, we have identified the path, and we try to limit the chances that the child will choose to go somewhere else. We do not want to lose them mentally any more than we want to lose them physically. We are more capable of making wise choices for our children if we recognize our need to maintain this selected environment for them. We also need to affirm two important features that are commonly ignored when we make reading choices for our children. These two features are 1) the inherent subversive nature of literature and 2) the internal autonomy of the child.
Literature is inherently subversive. We learn from stories, books, poems, and songs, and in learning we abandon ignorance. We acquire knowledge, conviction, and determination, often even the determination to acquire more knowledge. Those who teach children eventually must recognize the child's autonomy in making choices about what to learn, how to interpret what is learned, and what to pass on. Most popular young adult novels deal in some way with the complex of ideas surrounding the development of the individual from a child for whom choices are made to an adult who makes choices. The theme is prominent in Great Expectations, Huckleberry Finn, Where The Wild Things Are, Green Eggs and Ham, The Giver, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and countless other children's books as well as a lot of adult stories.
Literature has an inherent dual purpose contributing to its subversive nature. On the one hand, it transmits culture and the associated ideologies. On the other, it offers critique of culture and ideology. It cannot transmit the culture without the critique or offer the critique without transmitting the culture. Censorship is part of this pattern that creates the excitement of literature. It calls attention to how we as individuals and cultural groups state, develop, and preserve what we truly value. Censorship in its many guises compels us to evaluate and to discriminate. It is a kind of gravity of ideas against which we are compelled to struggle but without which we could not walk.
I oppose censorship by government and ideological groups because I believe that ideas belong to me and that I should not be denied access to whatever I choose to consider. Nevertheless, for my students when I was teaching, and for my own children, I was a discriminating censor. Parents and teachers should be censors, and they should at the same time be disappointed when their censorship is accepted without question. Once you teach children to read and to think about what they read, your hope for them must be that they will become inner-directed and self-reliant readers and critics who will be at least as strong in their own judgments as you have been in yours.
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