Kindle Notes & Highlights
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February 6 - February 12, 2025
The first views the child as a tabula rasa and sees sexuality, violence, vulgarity, and other behaviors as learned behaviors. The second construction views childhood as time when these behaviors are latent.
children. To disagree with the challengers’ assessment of a particular book means that one is unconcerned with children’s innocence.
As found in discourse throughout this study, the language used is martial. This challenger notes that parents must “defend” children from outside forces that are filled with definite dangers to children since these forces are filled with “obscenity and corruption.”
L P L has outrageously adopted policies that put youth at the risk to be sick for life or their possible death by allowing books on their shelves that encourage reckless sexual behaviors. The library has chosen this Playboy kind of book for children’s entertainment. Youth are their targeted segment of Lewiston’s population who have not attained the ability to process without trauma these pornographic illustrations and writings. “I P N” violates youth’s period of latency, robs them of their childhood, and greatly infringes upon necessary preparation for responsible adulthood. (Letter to the
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Presumably for this challenger, children’s sexuality is unrealized until they are either told about it by outsiders or it is awakened through reading.
This is the tabula rasa view of childhood: children’s minds did not contain objectionable knowledge before it was introduced and once there it cannot be removed.
The meaning of these shifts, that is, their structured structures, is profound, as it indicates for the challengers a change in the very fabric of civilization.
This analysis may seem exaggerated, but it is clear from the challengers’ discourse that they view these moral shifts in somewhat apocalyptic terms especially with regard to the consequences of these shifts on society.
When encountering such a signifier, challengers draw on the discourses of childhood innocence that structure their own worldviews to justify their arguments for relocation or removal of objectionable material.
Children who are exposed to the material will not grow up to be productive members of society.
As a consequence, not only will the local community be destroyed but also the larger society.
As previously discussed, Kerry Robinson notes that the ideas that adults attempt to censor tend to be difficult knowledge or “knowledge that many adults find challenging to address in their own lives but especially with children.”[8]
7. For a historical analysis of childhood innocence, and its relationship to media consumption, see Nicola Beisel, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
it is not the school’s responsibility to teach our children empathy.
This need for edifying media is a common theme in contemporary American evangelical Christian culture.
The interpretive strategies that one finds in challengers’ discourse focus on a mimetic, literal interpretation of texts.
books can change lives in both positive and negative directions, and reading can change one’s
If an idea is good and important, it will surface again in better surroundings.
Although challengers do not, of course, directly state that their construction of reading is grounded in this philosophical tradition, it is clear from their discourse that texts “mean what they say and say what they mean.”
They can live through it. But we can’t talk about it because we’re adults.
The challenger makes little room for texts that might use vulgarity or obscenity as part of a cautionary tale or as a marker of realism. Books and other media that do not build strong moral character in a very literal and mimetic sense are to be avoided at all costs.
For this challenger, reading material should be challenging but positive. Since teens are, by nature, “salacious” (a conceptualization of childhood discussed in chapter 4), adults must be sure that the texts that teens read are realistic but not to the point that they do not provide some sort of positive instruction for life.
This is similar to the issue of imagination discussed above; literature must not contain certain themes or images because reading
For the challenger, all educational materials across the school curriculum are interpreted by children and youth the same way.
Once again, there is a prevailing theme that including a particular book in the curriculum means that everything in the book is endorsed by the community.
Studies on brain research show that the human brain, particularly the frontal lobe (where judgment is made), is not fully developed until 22 to 25 years of age. Why are we subjecting our children to immoral situations and illegal acts when they are not ready to process
Exposure to the challenged book will inevitably lead to the negative effects in the long term, such as the destruction of the soul and, in the short term, embarrassment and acting out.
There is no middle ground before God. Either you are for me or you are against me. For if you are not putting good thoughts into these students minds, you are acting with Satan.
We hope you will agree and remove this book. I also strongly urge you to take a close look at what are [sic] children are being fed at school and make sure it is something that we want them to recreate in their minds or potentially act out. (Letter to the board, Merrill, WI, September 27, 2011)
If one is embarrassed while reading a particular text, then it contains objectionable material and should be removed or relocated:
The number one factor that increases the vulnerability of our children to sexual predators was their exposure to vulgar and profane language.
The definition of literature is “works having excellent form or expression or dealing with ideas of permanent and lasting interest.”
When an idea or concept is published it then becomes a legitimate idea or concept and it is through the act of writing and circulation that ideas gain traction in society.
we may be the minority today—that does not mean we’re wrong.
Another challenger in Stockton, Missouri, uses the dwindling rates of religious believers as a framework for discussing his sense of being one of the few who adhere to a particular set of beliefs:
We’re living in a post-Christian culture partially caused by post-Modernism that says that all truth is relative and we live in a world where there is [no] absolute truth.
The greatest war against human civilization is immorality. History will look back on the past 30–50 years as a dark time in human civilization. I felt a great sense of sadness when I received your e-mail. I keep hoping there might be a remnant with a dutiful sense of responsibility towards the youth.
The “remnant,” or the faithful few who are left after the apocalypse, is a common theme throughout the apocalyptic and spiritual warfare literature.[3]
They flourish depending on how moral that civilization
A civilization is a moral, culturally refined society with a robust infrastructure whose people eschew corruption.
It is clear from this language that challenges are not based simply on differences of opinion but are a struggle over what the moral structures of society will be in the future.
Within the construct of family design are limits and guidelines for behavior. One is not free in a moral society to act immorally without consequences. The designers of our constitution realized this.
many challenges for more progressive reasons. For example, one challenger in this study was concerned with use of bigoted language in Brave New World to describe Native Americans
“Boundary objects” are defined as forms and other written communication documents required by the challenge process.
[He] just said to get it out of the public library you have to sign it out to the parents if they’re under 18 to check it out and they get it out of the high school library without problem. That seems to be a little odd. It’s in the adult section of the public library. We don’t have an adult section in the high school library. They have it in there because they said there’s explicit material in it that has to do with pedophilia and suicide. (Male speaker #1, Book challenge hearing, Merrill, WI, September 29, 2011)
I terest
Here the permission slip for Internet use is described as a “phenomenal document” that adequately fulfills its role as a boundary object. For this challenger, the challenged book is not in line with the standards required by the school for Internet use. Therefore she does not understand how the item could be included in the curriculum when students would not be able to view what she believes to be similar material on the Internet.
The challenger argues that library administrators, by failing to label objectionable books, therefore support policies that are harmful to children and youth.
Fallacy
Library Code of Ethics.
Research
Book challenges represent the movement of a private act (determining what one’s own children should read) into the public sphere.
Shifts in sexual mores and gender roles as well as the perception of pervasive vulgarity and violence throughout the media landscape are leading society, according to their discourse, on a path to destruction.
