fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3035 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3035 ⌋

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

To be fair, school libraries have a responsibility to maintain a collection of books appropriate to their readership. In other words, it's probably not a good idea to have a book with a lot of sexual themes in a library for middle schoolers, for example.

Nobody can stop you from going to a public library and checking out something intended for older readers, and nobody should, but I do believe that schools, as ostensibly centers of learning, should reserve books like Gone With The Wind and similar works for older students who would be better informed about the context of those books.

I remember reading Elie Weisel's Night long before I had any real sense of the Holocaust. I was like, 12 maybe? Nightmares for a month.

Right. Waiting for maturity, appropriate history classes, etc, that's not censorship. That's tailoring the education for the audience. As long as it's available from another source, like a public library, it's okay.

And there are older students, so a motivated student could still ask if they can read a certain book. Parental approval, maturity, and providing context would be important, but it would still be available.

As long as it's available from another source, like a public library, it's okay.

And what if it's not, or the kids can't get to a public library? For some kids, the school library is the only place they can get books.

"they can get it somewhere else" is not in itself justification for why or why not a book should be in a school library, especially when a lot of kids can't get books anywhere else.

Ah, see, I was assuming it would be located in, say, a different section of the library, or there is a public library in easy distance (I sometimes forget that not everyone grows up in a small town where everything's in walking distance from everything else!). My school library did that: you had the kindergarten area, the 1st-3rd, 4th-6th, 7th&8th. If you were younger and wanted an older book, the librarian would tell you, "this might be beyond your level/there's upsetting content/etc, are you sure you want this book."

I am completely on the side of availability, but with context and information. If there's no other source, I think a library has an obligation to provide reasonable access. Of course, I don't think a library should stock literally every book, but kids need to encounter painful, upsetting, or difficult things in the safety of a book.

My school library did that: you had the kindergarten area, the 1st-3rd, 4th-6th, 7th&8th.

My elementary school did that. I don't think you could just ask for a restricted book though: the kids that were allowed to read up were given blanket permissions to read higher grades or given totally unrestricted access.

Of course, I don't think a library should stock literally every book, but kids need to encounter painful, upsetting, or difficult things in the safety of a book.

I agree. We tend to think "someone older could deal with X content better" but part of that is because with exposure and experience comes coping ability and a greater ability to understand. You have to build that up somehow, and books are a good way.

More challenging material should be available (whether restricted or not) because for kids that are intellectually gifted or more mature, school can already be a boring and stifling place. Making them read Junie B. Jones when they should be reading Moby Dick isn't helping them, it's throwing them under the bus in the name of protecting other kids from those books.

I read The Book Thief at eight or nine. Less horrible than Night, but still pretty awful. To this day I haven't reread it.

Oh wow.

That is such a good book but I don't know if I could have handled it at nine, either. (Honestly, I probably wouldn't have understood it, and/or would have been bored with it at the very beginning and put it back down.)

Oh Jesus I read Kaffir Boy at thirteen or so. There was no words for our D8.

--Rogan

[ SECRET POST #3035 ]

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