According to Didi Tang and Mary-Beth Marklein from USA Today, "The number of reposted challenges in the past thirty years has hovered between four hundred and five hundred (books) each year," says Deborah Caldwell-Stone., an attorney with the American Library Associaion." The complete definition of censorship is to examine letters, books, films, etc. and remove or ban anything regarded as harmful; but really, is censorship to us "good judgement", or over-protectiveness to what educators with the same exposure to the graphic details really harmful to teach?
Censorship is one of the most arguemented topics in schools, libraries, and even court systems today. One of the topics most discussed against books are that the given assignments are uneducating because they are so offensive. Parents always push those books off the shelfs because they are unhealthy for their children to be reading. In document one, it explains "We've got to have educated kids, and we've got to be a moral people," Wesley Scroggins said while talking the the interviewers of USA Today. Although, kids today have never been so understanding of the modern world and history until they have read some of these books!
Common books for school assignments that have been placed on the banned list are Culture and Values: A Survey of the Humanities, The Absolutley True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology. All these books were placed on this list by parents from all over the country. The reality is though, did kids actually enjoy these books and learn a lesson from them? When looking under the comments section of Amazon.com, there is clearly nothing but love for these books. "This book is fascinating! It is a good amount of information through the ages about art history and historical events surrounding the different time periods and cultures," said Mammo Queen for Culture and Values: A Survey of the Humanities. "For a story about an impoverished teen on an Indian reservation who has an alcoholic father and faces bullies and racism and the deaths of several close relatives, I sure laughed a lot. I loved the written humor and the wonderful cartoons throughout the book, as well as learning something about life on a reservation. I finished this fast-paced book in two days and was sorry to see it end. This is one of my favorite young adult novels," said Debra Garfinkle about The Absolutley True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. "This was a truly amazing book. I must have read every piece at least three times, and I constantly found myself wanting to stop random people just to read them a line or two. Some of the works were very far from me, but I appreciated their perspectives and experiences anyway. Others, though, felt so much like my story that it was scary that someone else had written them. I think that's the best thing about this book. Everyone can relate to something in it. Before I read it, I knew there were people who felt the same way as me, I just didn't relize how rarely I heard them express it openly. It felt so good to relate to it the way I did, and the way I know almost any queer kid could. You should definitely read this book," said Rai Borsetti about Revolutionary Voices: A Multicultural Queer Youth Anthology. Kids voices get sucked under everything and get forgotten about because they forget that they
