Dear Ms. Berner and the School Administration,
Reading in general helps people with better vocabulary, comprehension skills, and speaking. Many different books can also emotionally impact a person's thoughts or opinions. So, should books that deal with hard to handle issues be banned because of how they may scare a person and make them have alarming thoughts? So far, in America, thousands of books have been banned in schools and libraries due to some “inappropriate” and “dark” content. However, I think otherwise because books that focus on more serious topics can be beneficial towards how people, especially teenagers, think, and they could get knowledgeable information out of them. Overall, I disagree with the idea of banning books in general because everyone has different maturity levels, and more somber books can teach people about real world issues.
Firstly, more advanced and serious books can teach teenagers about very crucial and detrimental problems that are happening/happened in our world, and they could teach teens to not get involved in such complications. People can't be shielded from the different factors that affect their lives today, even if they are negative, and books are an easier way of addressing these problems to teenagers. The article “Should More YA Fiction Be Read In Schools?”, which was posted on www.theguardian.com, talks about how schools don’t incorporate books that deal with serious issues into their lessons at school, and that they are not seen on many bookshelves at schools. “These stories could be so beneficial to students, while at the same time potentially opening them up to a broader reading base and helping them discover something in themselves that they didn’t know before.” This quote demonstrates how many young adult books that deal with devastating troubles help teenagers learn about these dilemmas by showing them how they are being applied in their lives today, and how they were being applied in the past. This method of learning opens teenagers’ eyes to the world around them, and allow them to make many responsible decisions on their own so that they avoid such obstacles.
Additionally, many YA books that contain adverse issues help teenagers because teens can relate to the characters that are facing similar problems to what they’re facing. The characters in the YA books help teens cope with their emotions, and even inspire them to help minimize the amount of issues going on in the world. In Maureen Johnson’s article, “Yes, Teen Fiction May Be Dark, But it Shows Teenagers That They Are Not Alone,” she talks about exactly what the title says; how teens aren’t alone, and how they rely on books to remind them of this. “If subjects like these are in YA books, it's to show that they are real, they have happened to others, and they can be survived. For teenagers, there is sometimes no message more critical than: you are not alone.” This quote explains the goodness in having something to relate to, even if it’s a character in a book. Many people don’t understand how important it is for teenagers to relate to someone who is going through exactly what they are going through, and Johnson’s article is telling people how a lot of teenagers need more things than people think to keep them emotionally stable and even jubilant. In Sherman Alexie’s article “Why the Best Kids Books are Written in Blood”, Alexie also explains how rather gloomy YA books can have an extremely positive impact on teens. “And there are millions of teens who read because they are sad and lonely and enraged. They read because they live in an often-terrible world. They read because they believe, despite the callow protestations of certain adults, that books-especially the dark and dangerous ones-will save them.” Here, Alexie demonstrates how books help kids escape from their own lives and look at someone else’s who is living a similar life to them. The fact that teens aren’t alone are enough to get them off their feet and do something about the problems out there. Furthermore, the way these YA books are written is so that they are realistic and true. The authors purposefully do this, so that teens know that authors are aware of these problems, and they show that the know by writing these inspiring books to help teenagers cope, and these books can even save the lives of teenagers because they’re so impacting.
Although these somber YA books do educate teens about these problems and how to control their own problems, they still contain very horrifying content that may startle many teens and put them in a state of shock. Meghan Gurdon talks about the disturbing content that many YA books accommodate in her article “Darkness to Visible”. “If books show us the world, teen fiction can be like a hall of fun-house mirrors, constantly reflecting back hideously distorted portrayals of what life is.” In this quote, Gurdon depicts what she thinks of many YA books based on the gruesome topics they encircle. Gurdon says that these books are showing problems to their extent, almost as if they’re being exaggerated to frighten the reader and make them almost too aware of what’s going on in our world. However, these serious books are written by authors that are not exaggerating problems, instead they are showing them for how they are. The positive ways that teenagers respond to these books show that Gurdon is wrong and that problems are shown how they are in the real world, even if they are hideous and hard to handle. In Ellen Hopkins’s article, “Banned Books Week 2010: An Anti Censorship Manifesto,” she describes how a high schooler responded to one of her books. “She saw herself in those pages, and suddenly knew she didn't want to be there. That book turned her around. Today she's been sober two years, is graduating high school and has embarked on a modeling career.” This is a great example of how a character in a book that deals with colossal issues in our world positively changes the way a person deals with their own life by impacting them to help themselves. The woman that Hopkins discussed said that she saw herself in the book, and that, by the writing of the book and the way the characters moved on, she realized that she needed to make a difference in her way of living. Reading these types of books helps people relate and see themselves and their problems for how they really are. These books shouldn’t be banned because then teenagers who need someone, even someone fictional, to relate to wouldn’t get that person, and the people who want to ban these books, such as Gurdon, are oblivious to how teenagers are positively reacting to these books.
Banning books in schools and libraries isn’t going to benefit the majority of the readers. Many teenagers are looking for a character in a book to relate to and someone that can help them with their own problems. Also, many teens just want knowledge about the problems at hand. People are able to choose what they want to read for a purpose, and the people who want, or need, to read more hard to handle books should have accessibility to those books. The people who don’t want to read a book like that don’t need to. Plus, Maureen Johnson’s article “Yes, Teen Fiction May Be Dark, But it Shows Teenagers That They Are Not Alone” says, “There isn't a YA writer alive who is out writing books to corrupt youth. No one writing about self-harm is teaching how to self-harm.”, and this statement is the truth. All of these YA books were written to inform people about exactly how bad many issues in our world are and were, and people are taking that the wrong way. It is important for all books to stay on the shelves of libraries and schools, no matter how revolting and terrifying, because who knows how positively teenagers will react when they see they aren’t alone and that they know they could help those in need.
Sincerely,
Evy Rahmey
Bibliography
Alexie, Sherman. "Why the Best Kids Books Are Written in Blood." Wall Street Journal. N.p., 9 June 2011. Web. 25 Nov. 2014. http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2011/06/09/why-the-best-kids-books-are-written-in-blood/?mod=google_news_blog
Gurdon, Meghan Cox. "Darkness Too Visible." The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, 4 June 2011. Web. 25 Nov. 2014 http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303657404576357622592697038?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303657404576357622592697038.html
Hopkins, Ellen. "Banned Books Week 2010: An Anti-Censorship Manifesto."The Huffington Post. TheHuffingtonPost.com, 30 Sept. 2010. Web. 25 Nov. 2014. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellen-hopkins/banned-books-anticensorship-manifesto_b_744219.html
Johnson, Maureen. "Yes, Teen Fiction Can Be Dark - but It Shows Teenagers They Aren't Alone." The Guardian. N.p., 8 June 2011. Web. 25 Nov. 2014. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/jun/08/teen-fiction-dark-young-adult
"Should More YA Fiction Be Read In Schools?" Www.theguardian.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 25 Nov. 2014.
