Banned and Challenged Book Collection and Display
According to the American Library Association, (ALA) web page “the most frequently challenged authors in 2000 were: J.K. Rowling, Robert Cormier, Lois Duncan, Piers Anthony, Walter Dean Myers, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, John Steinbeck, Maya Angelou, Christopher Pike, Caroline Cooney, Alvin Schwartz, Lois Lowry, Harry Allard, Paul Zindel, and Judy Blume.” Many of these authors write books designed to catch the interests of school age children.
Why have a collection?
Although the practice of banning and challenging books is relatively old, it appears to be an exercise that will not disappear as long as the written word meets the page. Because of this phenomenon, it is important that our teachers have the facts for such challenges. This information will give pre-service teachers the information needed to make concrete choices on what they will bring into the classroom setting. The new display also serves as an educational drill and gives educators the opportunity to broaden their knowledge of children’s, juvenile, and young adult literature.
Part of the Curriculum Center’s mission is to expose its patrons to materials that are popular as well as controversial without the censorship of placing them under special controls. With this in mind, the Center will have two copies of each title. One copy will be for reference, and the other will be a circulating copy that can be checked out by patrons. Accompanying the display will be factual literature concerning the banning/challenging of the titles.
Censorship & Literature Websites
The National Council of Teachers of English
http://www.ncte.org/about/issues/censorship
What You Need to Know about Literature
http://classiclit.about.com/od/bannedliteratur1/
The Online Books Page
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/banned-books.html
Electronic Frontier Foundation Defending Freedom in the Digital World
http://www.eff.org/br/
Censorship and Intellectual Freedom Page
http://php.indiana.edu/~quinnjf/censor.html
Loyola University Chicago Libraries: Banned Books and Censorship, Information and Resources
http://libraries.luc.edu/about/exhibits/banned/index.shtml
American Library Association
www.ala.org
American Civil Liberties Union
http://www.aclu.org/
Free Expression Network/Clearinghouse
www.freeexpression.org
National Coalition Against Censorship
http://www.ncac.org/
Words for Thought
“The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is, and what it was. The world around will forget even faster.”
Novelist Milan Kundera
"Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear."
-- Harry S. Truman, message to Congress, August 8, 1950
"Don't join the book burners. Don't think you are going to conceal thoughts by concealing evidence that they ever existed."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower, speech at Dartmouth College, June 14, 1953
"Books won't stay banned. They won't burn. Ideas won't go to jail. In the long run of history, the censor and the inquisitor have always lost. The only sure weapon against bad ideas is better ideas. The source of better ideas is wisdom. The surest path to wisdom is a liberal education."
-- Alfred Whitney Griswold, Essays on Education
"Children deprived of words become school dropouts; dropouts deprived of hope behave delinquently. Amateur censors blame delinquency on reading immoral books and magazines, when in fact, the inability to read anything is the basic trouble."
-- Peter S. Jennison
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Last Updated 03/28/07 |