by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist
Last month I used to space on one occasion to spotlight a high school teacher in Florida who was fighting back against his state's fascist education policies by raising money to buy banned books for his students to read during the summer. And while Adam Byrn Tritt was having great success with his project and placing banned books into the hands of many of his high school students, his efforts were just a mere drop in the bucket of actions needed to address the crisis of school districts nationwide pulling books from their shelves based on the religious beliefs of some of the school's more noisy patrons.
Some school districts are coming to the harsh realization that they are no longer operating in the dark ages where offensive (to some) volumes can simply be pulled from the shelves, placed in a pile on the football field, and set ablaze - and impressionable youth will be denied the opportunity to peruse filth like "The Catcher in the Rye," "Slaughterhouse Five," and "A Separate Peace." (All of those are exceptional works of literature, by the way.) Now when Reverend Cranky Pants and his hate-mongering League of Decency relieve the school library of its only copy of "The Bluest Eye," a student with resources can purchase a copy on-line and have it delivered to his or her phone before the good reverend and his entourage have reached the school parking lot.
Of course, so many of the limits being placed on public education are, in fact, intended as limits on those without resources - or the means to acquire materials on their own. Children born into households with adequate means will always have access to the things they need to make their lives better, from books, to decent health care, to good nutrition, to personal enrichment experiences and travel - the list is endless. But when society restricts opportunities, their intent is always to limit opportunities for those already underprivileged, those without means. They see an underclass steeped in ignorance and poverty as essential to maintaining their own social and economic superiority.
There are scattered individuals out there, people like Adam Byrn Tritt in Florida, fighting to bring educational opportunities to every social strata, but their cumulative efforts still leave many poor students without ready access to the materials and ideas that will always be readily available to their more privileged peers. Now, however, that may be changing.
The Brooklyn Public Library announced this past April that it was beginning a program which it called "Books UnBanned" in an effort to "help teens combat the negative impact of increased censorship and book bans in libraries across the country." The library was providing free "eCards" to students aged 13 to 21 anywhere in the United States. The cards are good for one year and will give students access to 350,000 e-books, 200,000 audiobooks, and over 100 databases.
But perhaps the best part of the Brooklyn Public Library's new program is that it will help empower teens to bring the fight against censorship back to their communities. The library's program will connect teens to their peers in Brooklyn, including members of the Brooklyn Public Library's "Intellectual Freedom Teen Council," so that they may help one another with resources and information to fight censorship, make book recommendations, and promote the defense of freedom to read.
I suspect that it exactly the sort of outcome that Andrew Carnegie had in mind when he began fueling the public library movement in America. It's one thing to pull a few hundred books off of library shelves, and quite another to pull down the World Wide Web. The book-banners and book-burners may be on the march, but they have already been outflanked and defeated by modern technology.
They just haven't realized it yet!
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