I remember a book that came out in 1953 called Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury about book censorship. It told the story of how books were burned to stifle intellectual freedom. It was very graphic and came out at a time when schools were trying to ban books from their libraries even though they violated the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.
There were a lot of schools trying to get the classics off the shelves like Chaucer. Who ever heard of his Canterbury Tales being considered unreadable? Golden Shakespeare? So what if Romeo and Juliet consummated their marriage before their wedding? That wasn’t the point of the story, and these holy-rollers were trying to strip the school library shelves of classics like these.
But now, there is a new concern, a very deep concern. Schools are trying to eliminate textbooks and replace them with electronic books. And because? Well, the first objection I ran into was that they were too heavy to carry around. Too heavy to carry? These are children, not octogenarians; they can carry books like we did.
Educators say students can go online and print the pages that matter. Who can say what is important to a child’s mind? School is the place where we learn to evaluate what we are reading and where we learn to make decisions based on what our fertile minds read on the pages of these books.
Another objection is that textbooks are expensive to print. If textbooks are too expensive to print and we’re doing away with them, we’ll definitely be breeding future generations of jerks.
If these so-called educators are deciding which books are morally fit for our children to read, we will be raising generations of adults who cannot think for themselves and can only accept the exasperated version of what is acceptable information. No wonder there is such a widespread theory that there is a conspiracy to keep us stupid and uninformed.
As someone who still has many of my high school and college textbooks on my library shelves, just to think that the children of tomorrow will one day ask their parents, “What is a book?” it’s frightening
Online books are great for certain things, but textbooks deserve to be delivered to students and remain on library shelves in every school. No one has the right to censor what the people read. And that means religious fanatics, politicians, educators, do-gooders, and anyone else. Books are meant to be read and minds are given to people to use, and when we deprive people of both, we deny them their First Amendment rights and the right to choose for themselves.
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