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Opinion
Removing Books from School Libraries is NOT Censorship
There’s a difference between banning books and letting parents decide what their children read
In today’s newspaper, there were two articles about books being removed from public school libraries. One was local, one was national. Both bordered on hysterical.
No one pointed out that those books are still widely available.
They could be in public libraries (assuming the librarians felt there was sufficient demand and chose to stock them) and they’re still available for purchase in bookstores and online.
I imagine school libraries still work much the same way today as they did decades ago when I was a young student — kids were encouraged to browse, explore, and check out the books that appealed to them. No one monitored them because the assumption was that if the book was in the school library, it was safe.
That’s as it should be.
At the same time, parents are entitled to know about and control what their children read. Parents have the right to feel comfortable knowing that they can send their children to school and the school won’t provide them with materials they consider…
