Banning books is nothing new, banning ideas from reaching the masses is nothing new. The American education system has been the focal point of freedom of expression and new ideas since the time we began passing on ideas to our younger generations.
Censorship is a permeable fine line between what passes for well written or displayed good taste and gratuitous crudeness. It is a matter of style. Vulgarity can be accepted if it is written well, vulgarity will be banned if it is not.
Who decides what is well written? Every individual, but they need access in order to determine for themselves what they don’t want or do want in their lives.
Lets get a few terms out in the open:
Censorship is the suppression of ideas and information that certain persons—individuals, groups or government officials—find objectionable or dangerous. It is no more complicated than someone saying, “Don’t let anyone read this book, or buy that magazine, or view that film, because I object to it! ” Censors try to use the power of the state to impose their view of what is truthful and appropriate, or offensive and objectionable, on everyone else. Censors pressure public institutions, like libraries, internet service providers, and schools to suppress and remove from public access information they judge inappropriate or dangerous, so that no one else has the chance to read or view the material and make up their own minds about it. The censor wants to prejudge materials for everyone.
Censorship occurs when expressive materials, like books, magazines, films and videos, websites, or works of art, are removed or kept from public access. Individuals and pressure groups identify materials to which they object. Sometimes they succeed in pressuring schools not to use them, libraries not to shelve them, book and video stores not to carry them, publishers not to publish them, art galleries not to display them, or internet service providers not to allow them. Censorship also occurs when materials are restricted to particular audiences, based on their age or other characteristics.
Intellectual freedom is the right of every individual to both seek and receive information from all points of view without restriction. It provides for free access to all expressions of ideas through which any and all sides of a question, cause or movement may be explored.
Intellectual freedom is the basis for our democratic system. We expect our people to be self-governors. But to do so responsibly, our citizenry must be well-informed.
Libraries provide the ideas and information, in a variety of formats, to allow people to inform themselves.
Intellectual freedom encompasses the freedom to hold, receive and disseminate ideas.
When someone takes it upon themselves to determine when censorship is to be enforced they immediately step on the intellectual freedom that is basic to every persons right to choose.
Book banning is a familiar foe of American education and peaks during cycles of political and cultural conservatism. "Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself," United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart remarked. "It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime."
Free people everywhere intuitively hold a deeply felt disdain for authoritarianism in all of its various forms. Censorship has crept into our ability to freely receive opposing views via the internet. The supposed ‘superhighway’ of information.
Newspaper editors practice censorship daily by restricting what news stories reach the public. They all have dead files where stories considered outside the scope of their newspapers charter are filed.
Internet service providers, by the very nature of their identity as ‘service providers’, have no business censoring anything that passes through their servers.
The owners of these services have the mistaken notion that if they allow objectionable material to pass through their servers then they are somehow associated with the person or persons creating the ‘objectionable’ material.
There are many cases in which censorship is the core reason for a riff between students and teachers, teachers and school boards, school boards and the public, the public and governments.
Charleston, West Virginia high school students recently mounted a protest against parents and the Kanawha County Board of Education for restricting their reading of two Pat Conroy books depicting graphic violence, suicide and sexual assault.
Webb City, Missouri students learned first hand the relationship between banning books and how it increases the popularity of those books. The books in question are from a series referred to as the Alice books. They deal with issues of an adolescent girl's development.
Arlington, Texas school board members have banned cleavage for this upcoming school year because they “think their daughters are growing up a little bit too fast these days” and “our young males are looking at more than their English book, their speech book, their science book.” The new dress code reads, in part, “The display of cleavage is unacceptable. Low cut blouses, tops, sweaters, etc. with plunging necklines are not allowed."
Texas school officials rejected a widely used environmental textbook, claiming it was filled with errors. The author says they're censoring him because they didn't like his green views.
Miami-Dade Florida school board sued by ACLU for removing a childrens book on life in Cuba from its library.
And who can forget the famous 1925 Scopes Trial, in which two of America's most famous attorneys debated whether evolution should be taught in the public schools.
These examples involve what we try to and try not to pass on to our children. They are all in the form of books. But the internet is another story.
Total censorship of the internet is impossible, for now. Given the nature of the internet’s ability to ignore national borders, those seeking knowledge from within, say North Korea and China, can access information hosted by computers outside of their control very easily.
Since governments cannot own the internet, government attempts at censoring content will fail. The human mind’s need to expand will not be cloistered by those who wish to maintain control over them. The current design of the internet dictates that you cannot keep this genie in its bottle.
While there is no universally agreed upon definition of what constitutes "pervasive censorship", organization Reporters without Borders (RSF) maintains an internet enemy list while the OpenNet Initiative categorizes some nations as practicing extreme levels of Internet censorship. Such nations often censor political content and may retaliate against citizens who violate the censorship with measures such as imprisonment.
You can imagine who is on Reporters Without Borders enemy list, but let’s identify them anyway: Cuba, Iran, Maldives, Myanmar, North Korea, People’s Republic of China, Syria, Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen.
These nations are identified by OpenNet Initiative as having filtered the internet for various reasons, ranging from sex videos to criticism of a military’s regime: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, European Union, Fiji, Finland, France, India, Israel, Italy, Morocco, Norway, Pakistan, Russia, Singapore, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, United Kingdom, and the United States.
Can censorship be surgically applied? Not yet. And until it can be this basic tenant of our free society should not be allowed to be exercised by a handful of overly zealous prudes.
Submitted to you for further exploration of censorship and to educate yourself to its ugly pervasiveness, checkout these websites and books:
American Library Association celebrates banned book week every year at the end of September.
Forbidden Library posts a list of books that some people consider “dangerous”.
Banned Books and Censorship identifies some sites that deal with who bans books and why.
Censorship or Education? Feminist views on pornography
Censoring controvery undermines education
Pornography, Obscenity and the Case for Censorship
Book Censorship bibliography
As always, you are encouraged to submit comments.
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