Every Rose

 [The following was written as a response to an op-ed by Mark Franek regarding the desire to censor a children's book written by Susan Patron.]

I found this article very amusing. Reading through some of the other responses, I think Dan puts it the best when he says, “There are more important things going on in this world than the word “scrotum” in a middle school reading level book. ” For example, I highly doubt that the families of the Virginia Tech students who were killed today are too worried about whether their child read about scrotums at a young age, they just want them alive again. I think it’s absolutly rediculous that anyone, be it parents, librarians, teachers, etc., would want to censor this word from their children’s literature. If anything I think that hearing words like that could really only help a child growing up. When kids are told that they can’t use the word penis because it’s a bad word, what is the first thing they want to say around their friends? Penis. If innocent story books have these words in rotation it takes the sense of “bad” off the word and the children are then not as prone to use it. When people go through and try to black out the word or cover it up, there will always be that kid that goes back to a bookstore in search of the book to find out what it says. If people are going to go through the libraries and scratch out words as innocent as scrotum, where will they go next? Before we know it they will be scratching out the classics, and they have absolutly no right to do that. They are called classics for a reason.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 25th, 2007 at 1:03 pm and is filed under English Class soundoffs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.