There is this tendency in education to shield students from controversial ideas that gets reinforced when ever some vocal minority speaks up and complains. It’s led to bans on Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, the two greatest works from one of America’s greatest writers, because of their use of a racial epithet, even though both works are meant to show how wrong racial prejudices are. It’s led to bans on books by Kurt Vonnegut and Judy Blume because they deal with controversial subjects. And, now, it’s leading a Virginia school district, ironically located in the home county of one of America’s greatest advocates of books and reading, to choose to shield children rather than teach them. That doesn’t strike me as constructive at all.But it also strikes me that the temptation to ban controversial works is responsible for the rise to prominence of the issue-driven YA genre, in which hackneyed, stereotypical characters are presented with one (only one) obvious morally wrong or ethically dubious situation. The plots are rote and the lessons perfunctory. If one really wants to kill off interest in reading at an early age, those books are an excellent way to do so.
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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