shoot man....I want mine reading Uncle Remus,watching Amos and Andy and memorizing Gone With the Wind.
Huck and _____Jim are as important as Samson and the jawbone insofar as good stories for my kids.
Oh, I agree, Mark Twain was one of America’s greatest authors. Not only did he capture the wonder of being a adolescent boy, he captured the atmostphere of the American culture at that point in time. It’s a shame that Disney’s Song of the South is banned in America.
But, one of the precepts that I agree with is that parents have the right to determine what their children consume, be it food, required reading materials, matters of faith and political views. I defend a parent’s right to be a Communist as much as I defend their right to be a
Conservative - for what the gov’t can do to the least of us, it can do to the majority of us.
But the question remains, in a Public Library, where do you draw the lines? I think it should be a Community effort, not the effort of a few self-appointed censors. IMHO, those who become self-appointed censors may start out doing something for the ‘Greater Good’ but soon become power hungry tyrants.
I’d much rather have a book on the shelf that never gets checked out, and just gathers dust; than to have a group demand that I never have the option to read it. That said, I have no problem with sexual materials being presented; at an age appropriate area. If a parent does not want their child to know about sexual relations, that should not prevent my kids from gathering information.
Now I’m just a silly engineer; so I try to remove emotion from my arguements. We make decisions that affect both our lives, and the lives of others based upon information we have. If we have little or no information- we make decisions based upon our limited information. My view is that poor information leads to poor decisions; whether we are talking about economics, building a tree house, or sex.