Some books should be banned from schools
Those petitions making the rounds throughout North America that want a litany of books banned from classrooms and school libraries may be driven by a similar litany of homophobic or transphobic or self-righteous, religious orthodoxies, but there really are some books that should not be in our schools and someone has not done due diligence in screening them.
My wife recently brought to my attention one of those petitions that included an excerpt from an “offending” book.
Since I am fully supportive of books depicting two moms or two dads or focused on samesex relationships and have no real objection to coarse language, I merely opined that she should ignore it. But she urged me to read the cited passage.
In expressive detail, it described an incestuous sexual encounter between a father and a nine-year-old child with the skilled craft of an adult novelist. When I later read through the book, I saw that with the same skilful adult writing, it described in detail more incest encounters, teen sexual encounters (some involving bondage), and other behaviours stemming from childhood trauma.
Most of the titles listed on the petition only included offensive language, drug use, or scenarios about LGBTQ issues — none of which, as a high school counsellor, I found especially alarming or detrimental to the psychological development of today’s teens. However, there were others that depicted in graphic detail incidents of teen anal and oral sexual acts, as well as drawn scenes of graphic oral sex between teenagers.
My objection is to books offered through school libraries or classrooms using explicit detailed sexual scenarios of teens written from the imaginations of adult writers — with adult publishing power — intruding into teenage minds.
This is a theft of the kids’ own private sexuality and a betrayal of their childhood right to develop and explore their own individual sexuality.
Schools are psychological stamps of approval in the minds of children. So stories and instruction they offer about sexuality must be holistic and appropriate for the developmental stages of our kids.
Emotions, personal space, social repercussions, self-esteem and self-image, power imbalances, manipulation, consent, respect, empathy, fear, nervousness, privacy, complexity in relationships, the transitoriness and flux of every child’s personality, rejection, abandonment, loss, and mindfulness — these are all holistic components of how we must present sexuality in schools.
Otherwise, we usher our kids into a superficial, body-only, encounter-based, stimulation or impulsivity more connected to fitting in rather than self-loving and intimacy.
We don’t need a scattergun approach of petitions to foster the well-being of our kids, we need our teachers and school librarians to actually read the books to ensure that the content does not impose adult sexual needs or perspectives that will be internalized by our kids.