Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Anyone out there read Jump Ship To Freedom? Probably not, it was banned in the 90s...

Why ban books? It'll just make kids want to read it to rebel!
Most of the books on the ALA list of banned or challenged books I have not even heard of. I had to go back a few years before I saw some that were familiar, though I will admit, I hardly remember what they were about. I remember my class reading Of Mice And Men, The Catcher In The Rye and Go Ask Alice. I honestly couldn't tell you any major plot points of any of them. Clearly I didn't pay enough attention in my Language Arts classes in high school... I have read the entire Harry Potter series, along with The Hunger Games and saw the movie version of Perks of Being A Wallflower. On the list, I had to laugh at the reasons for banning the Harry Potter and Hunger Games series' as they just seemed ridiculous. Harry Potter is at no point "anti-family" and is not pointing children toward the occult or Satanism. It is a fictional story about the personal development of a child, who was emotionally abused by his blood relatives, as he forms a new "family" of friends and advisors who love and support him. Sure, there is magic in there too, but that really isn't the focus of the series, if you really take the time to read it. For Perks of Being A Wallflower, I would have to know what age group had been reading it when it was challenged/banned. I realize that depression and suicide are taboo topics, but really, if kids can relate to the story and learn that there is hope, that people will always care about you and want to help you, then why would you NOT want your child to read it? It may not be right for elementary aged students to read it, but that is not the intended age group for the book anyway. Once they get into middle school and especially high school, students deal with a lot more bullying and the statistics for suicide for those ages is incredibly disheartening. There is one book that I really remember reading as a child that was banned in our school district while we were in the middle of reading it. It was Jump Ship To Freedom by James Collier and Christopher Collier. It was an amazing story of bravery and fighting injustice, but was taken from us mid-lesson because some parents thought the language was offensive and that we as 5th graders shouldn't be exposed to it. As this was a story about a boy trying to escape slavery, the "N-word" was used an awful lot throughout the story, not particularly to be offensive and controversial, but because the time period that this story was supposed to take place in allowed that word to be said often. Even as 9 and 10 year olds, we understood that this was a word that was not nice and should not be used today. Honestly, it wasn't until our teacher informed us that we had to turn in our copies of the book and wouldn't be continuing the lesson (and why) that most of us even realized how often the word was used. Most of us begged and pleaded to finish the story anyway even if it wasn't part of our curriculum anymore, just to know what happened to the characters! Because of this, I remember this book far more than any of the others we read in school. If the parents had just let it go, I probably would have completely forgotten about it, just as I did any of the others.
This book has traveled with me ever since
5th grade. It's still on my bookshelf today.

Instead of hiding controversial books and avoiding touchy topics, we should be doing the exact opposite. I understand that some parents would rather address certain things at home rather than in a public school setting, but taking books out of public schools and local libraries seems rather petty to me. I feel like this should fall under the 1st amendment laws, but instead of it protecting what you say and print yourself, you should be free to read what you want. If the school doesn't cover a book or topic in class, I don't see why that book should be taken completely out of the public eye and not even made available in the library. If it is a book written for young adults, but possibly could offend some, so what? So many people are offended by so many different things that if we banned a book every time someone disagreed with some of the language or topics used, there would be no books left for anyone to read. In the article talking about the book parents were trying to ban in Sweet Home, one of the parents' argument was that if a student had worn a passage of the book on a T-shirt, he would be sent home to change as it is in direct conflict with the school's code of conduct rules. I loved how teacher Chelsea Gagner refuted the point by saying "Mark Twain and John Steinbeck are celebrated authors, but a lot of material they write about would not be endorsed on a T-shirt."

My bookshelf is a random collection of genres that might confuse people who actually stopped to read the titles. I have the entire series of Harry Potter, The Sword of Truth by Terry Goodkind, The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins. I have several mystery novels including a handful by Sue Grafton and a copy of The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly that I got to keep after someone left it behind at a restaurant I worked at. There are also several Manga books and some old text books I never bothered to sell back. I'm not sure what other people would take away from my book collection, but I would hope that they see that I enjoy good storytelling and don't really care what genre it falls under. I tend to lean a little more toward the fantasy side and love the "what if" questions that come from reading about magic and what it would be like if the world we live in suddenly had it.

Who needs universities anyway?
I really enjoyed how when Jeff Jarvis mentions the socialization aspect in schools, he talked about how he would rather see students nurtured and challenged, rather than pandering education to the lowest common denominator. This is something I have strongly believed in ever since the No Child Left Behind policy was enacted. By teaching to the slowest learner and taking their time, schools aren't challenging students to push their own limits and creativity, but are instead expected to slow down the learning process until everyone understands. Jarvis mentions that research would be hardest to nurture in the distributed architecture of "Google-U". I never thought about the concept and how it really would be necessary to have organized classrooms and labs to further develop ideas, even though with online resources we would be able to have more worldwide collaboration.

If I could change something about universities, it would definitely be the cost. I find it ridiculous how expensive a quality college education has become. I won't claim to have the answer on how to do it, but with so many other countries offering free higher learning, I can't believe that there is no way for it to happen in the United States as well. By making education free, or at the very least, more affordable, it makes it accessible to everyone without needing to be rich or drowning in student loan debts.

The other thing I would like to see changed isn't necessarily related to the university experience, but more with what happens in the real world. So many jobs require a college degree for employment. That alone is not a problem, except where they only require that you have the diploma and not that the diploma has anything to do with the job you are applying for. When I worked at the Target distribution center, our managers needed, at minimum, a bachelor's degree in order to run a department. It didn't have to have anything to do with warehouses, management or business. If they had a degree in underwater basket weaving, they were deemed worthy of the responsibility of managing a group of people doing a job they know nothing about. There were many entry level workers who were better leaders and had a higher understanding of how the warehouse functioned than most of the managers, but since they weren't up to their eyeballs in student loan debt and in possession of that highly coveted piece of paper, they weren't qualified. I feel that businesses, like Target, need to place a higher emphasis on the quality of their employees than the amount of formal education they've had. Too often, experience and knowledge are pushed aside in preference of a degree that has nothing to do with the position to be filled, and I just don't understand why.

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