CLOSE
LINKEDINCOMMENTMORE

Banned books and challenged books are books people question in the hands of minors, worrying it will be a bad influence.

The American Library Association (ALA) is observing Banned Book Week to bring to attention this phenomenon each year of the banning and challenging of books.

Banning books is a way to restrict both the author's and reader's creativity. Books are often challenged based on subject matter such as religion, violence, race and even homosexuality. In the school setting, why should students be restricted to learning about noncontroversial material? Why should content be questioned when it's possible to see the same material on the television or social networking sites?

Nobel Peace winners have been the target for attacks. Nobel Peace Prize winner Steinbeck had his book, "East of Eden," banned because of his use of profanity and a character, Cathy, became a prostitute.

Today, a well-known young adult author, John Green, had his book, "Looking for Alaska," banned due to the sexual content, drugs, alcohol and being unfit for its age group.

Although libraries may find it frustrating to deal with book challenges, they are committed to providing quality reading materials for students on a variety of topics and will not be persuaded to remove the titles from their library, always keeping in mind what's best for the collection and the student's education.

Banned Book Week (Sept. 21-27) offers many opportunities for meaningful participation.

From the ALA website, you can check out Banned Websites Awareness Day (Sept. 24), which draws attention to the censoring of internet sites that could otherwise benefit a student's education.

Libraries promote Banned Book Week to protect students' First Amendment rights and celebrate the freedom to read.

May everyone pick up a banned or challenged book and support Banned Book Week.

Chynah Jackson

Battle Creek

LINKEDINCOMMENTMORE
Read or Share this story: http://bcene.ws/1uz9oIm
https://www.battlecreekenquirer.com/story/opinion/2014/09/22/celebrating-books-banned/16065245/
www.battlecreekenquirer.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2019-43
154850
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:A2ENJTMNWQ7AE2GI2KMAEIWG6M6UIJF6
<urn:uuid:520cdd8f-f5b1-4dc8-a097-e6fa613a11fa>
2019-10-21T15:31:53Z
151.101.202.62
text/html
sha1:2RJFVLP4I36D36WPBNSXPNYY23VTOTKG
<urn:uuid:17802a5c-f5b6-4fec-b63e-d7cc85699a1a>
https://www.battlecreekenquirer.com/story/opinion/2014/09/22/celebrating-books-banned/16065245/
response
<urn:uuid:e2b05929-82b0-4d93-8727-fcb5787d64f5>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2019-43
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for October 2019
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-173.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.16 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.1-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/