Binary Opposition in Censorship

Censorship is an issue full of binary oppositions. The issue could not be extenuated without opposition from one side to the other. What is moral, what is immoral, who is right; parents or teachers, and art vs. pornography. These oppositions are the main points in each debate about censorship. Even the fight against censorship can be a binary; censors may inadvertently censor others while fighting censorship. The results of the fight over censorship ends in a binary; the informed vs. the uninformed. The issue of knowledge affects both sides of the fight. A librarian or teacher may not know the rules by which they can fight censorship and will submit without a fight. Censors may not even have read the books that they fight to censor.

The first binary of censorship is the most immediate opposition of parent vs. teacher. Children are brought up in schools to learn about the world around them. The job of the schools is to educate the child in the ways of the society they are a part of. This act of schooling has been defined as the Indoctrination Theory. "Children are to assimilate accepted attitudes and learn basic skills and a prescribed body of knowledge." (Oboler, 152) In view of this the school is allowed to do what they can to make children learned and critical of their surroundings. This can mean that certain types of literature must be read or certain activities performed to enhance a subject matter.

Parents must raise and parent their children in the way that they see fit. They have their own set of ideals and thoughts that they wish to instill in a child. Parents are there to remove anything that may harm their offspring mentally and physically. When something happens in school that they do not approve of the parents take action.

The opposition is who has the right to say what a child should and should not read. Schools have an obligation to made children learned members of society while parents have a right to raise their children anyway they want. An extreme case of this nature started 1974 in West Virginia. A school program was being created that would better help students understand the world around them. These books consisted of:

"Materials which accurately portray minority and ethnic group contributions to American growth and culture and which depict and illustrate the inter-cultural character of our pluralistic society. Programs at all grades will need to make clear 'that the United States is a multi-ethnic nation; the formulation of American institutions' and assist students in examining their own self-image." (Moffett, 11)

The school continued, not needing advice from the local citizenry. The books that were soon adopted were then publicly scrutinized because one member of the community found them offensive. Action was taken to remove the books, but because the time taken to review the books before instatement passed the school could legally adopt the books.

This was a debate that is repeated even today, and who is to say which side is right. The schools were right in developing a course and issuing textbooks that make the students critically aware of the country they are living in. Meanwhile the parents have a right to keep their children from material that they feel is offensive. Their reasons can be offense at the books because material that is false, but predominantly because some of it may be deemed as immoral. But parents in their quest to save their children can get overzealous in their actions. A woman frustrated over a book in a sixth grade class tried to take her proper steps to have it removed. When it wasn't removed she attacked books used in the eighth grade level.

"As a parent she wants her children to avoid situations and environments and books that contradict the values she wants them to learn during their impressionable years. She has a legal obligation to protect her children. The problem was she wanted to 'protect' all other children in that school system, by restricting what teachers could teach, and that is neither her right nor her obligation." (Simmons, 118)

The question of what is moral and immoral is a binary opposition that feeds the debate between parents and institutions that teach. Morals are a very tenuous ideal among people everywhere; what may offend one person may not offend another. Books that hold offensive material are just as varied as the people who criticize them. A book can be new, showing the lives of youths today, and be offensive, while a classic work of literature surviving decades can be just as harshly criticized.

Classic works of fiction have had the hardest time surviving censorship. Books such as; Huckleberry Finn, Romeo and Juliet, The Color Purple, and Brave New World are just some books that have tried to be censored more than once. The books are attacked because of objectionable material or themes within them. The material attacked is material that offers students insight into how the world around them works. The question of whether or not material that offers a wide array of viewpoints about the world is immoral. Oddly enough whenever a book is criticized it is not as a whole but because of specific passages. A debate was started about The Floatplane Notebooks, a book used to illustrate southern life concerning boys the age of the students. "The parents objected to the references to sex and masturbation and to the words 'piss' and 'damn' in the novel. (Simmons, 45)." As the debate progressed six passages of "offensive" material from the book was released, taking it out of context and labeling the book as dirty.

The question of what is moral and immoral has binaries that don't just relate to material in books. The act of attacking the school for providing knowledge can also be viewed as immoral. Schools are provided under law to provide the best education that they can. Most of the books they offer are objected to at some point or another. The books mentioned above hold viewpoints that may differ from that of the reader. The right to offer these books is protected by academic freedom.

"Academic freedom has meant protection for the critical function of scholars and teachers who believed they were attempting to advance knowledge by calling into question widely held or accepted beliefs. (Menand, 166)."

Is it morally right to deny anyone an education that will help them to advance in whatever form, or to even deny the people to provide that education? The debate in West Virginia mentioned above started over texts that provided students with a better understanding of the world around them. The material that was considered offensive was material that dealt with racism and identity in a frank and open manner. Despite this parents do have a right to protect their children from material that they may find to destroy certain mores of society. The main opposition in this binary is in defining what is moral. The question cannot be answered. The binary of moral and immoral does exist in many books, and the question that is not being answered is does some morally objectionable material outweigh the rest of the book that has worth to the rest of the public. The issue becomes even harder to answer when it can be seen that morally objectionable material helps to define the moral parts of the book. If that is the case does the whole book then become morally objectionable? But the question of whether or not it is right to attack schools is a question that must be dealt with in another binary; art vs. pornography.

This binary is heavily steeped in themes that are sexual. When it comes to art sex is not always pornographic, but just as the binary of morality, what may not offend some people may offend others. Classic novels as well as contemporary ones have been attacked for sexual content; The Color Purple, Romeo and Juliet, and a recent novel, Forever by Judy Blume. In the book a young girl questions whether she is ready to have sex with her boyfriend and upon doing so realizes that the love she feels is not forever, and may change. "Forever is attacked for its frankness about the young woman's sexual desires and decision-making process and for an explicit love scene. (Simmons, 48)." These attacks persist the book being on the American Library Association's "Best of the Best" List.

This book like the others mentioned before it is censored because of the openness with which the book treats sex. The story, theme, and voice of the book are provided to connect with other girls the same age and help them to understand about growing up and understanding what love is. But because the book contains themes of sex does that make it pornographic?

When it comes to censorship the defending side may become as overzealous as the other in their fight. What sometimes happens is a synthesis of the binary of right or wrong in one group. While trying to make things free people may also inadvertently censor others, becoming right and wrong.

"In all honesty, what is the real state of censorship and book banning in America? Well, very few -- if any -- books in this country are currently banned. You can buy almost any title that you want, download tons of information from the Web that you need, and you can check out all sorts of things at your public library. Nor is censorship dangerously on the rise as the ALA is apt to insinuate." (McKinzie)

The practices that the association espouses are right in their eyes, but in holding this ceremony they take an issue and make it bigger than it seems. The information they distribute is wrong. What may be needed to fix this is a change in content, maybe books that have been banned or removed from schools.

This leads to the binary looming largely in the issue of censorship, that of knowing and not knowing. This may be of the particular books, large groups of people typically haven't read the books they campaign against, but because they know it to have offensive material they have a reason to ban it. This has been seen in some of the cases stated above. Leaders for censorship distribute materials that will help them in their fight to ban books. In the case of West Virginia many of the parents received such handouts that had excerpts alleged to be from the banned books. "These fliers contained selections not only from the eight books that were deleted from the approved purchase list, but also excerpts from other books, such as Kate Millet's Sexual Politics, that were never a part of the language arts program. For example one part of the flier contained a page from the book identified as Facts about Sex for Today's Youth dealing with sexual intercourse." (Moffett, 17)

The group did use tactics that were not right in the fight, but the knowledge they disseminated was wrong. Parents that were then unknowledgeable fought with the knowledge they thought was right, but in fact they were still unknowledgeable. The binary of knowledge or no knowledge extends to the part of the teacher or the librarian also. This can also effect them in two ways that may not be known to them.

A teacher may first have knowledge of books and what to do with them. "Some teachers/librarians do establish guidelines for selection of materials and a policy to handle censorship, but they do not involve the administration in the policy-making. (Oboler, 108)" In this case the librarian or teacher obviously had the knowledge of how to deal with censorship but without providing knowledge to others they harm themselves in the overall fight against censorship by not knowing to talk to others or spreading that knowledge. There is also another group that aid the censors and harm their ability to fight, because they lack knowledge of the policies that school uses to deal with censorship. When this happens the teacher may remove the book without a fight and submit without having to. People without knowledge of either side of the fight believe in the knowledge that they may have and needlessly censor.

The issue of censorship is filled with binaries of many different natures. Separate binaries are at tension with each other under the whole issue. But each binary can be linked to the other. An unanswered binary is perpetuated because it is connected to a binary that is also unanswered. The binary of art vs. pornography cannot be answered until the binary of moral vs. immoral is defined. The issue of parents vs. teacher and who is right or wrong cannot be answered until what is moral vs. immoral and art vs. pornography is answered. The separate binaries can be then placed into larger binaries that serve to define the overall issue of censorship better.