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*I had to write the following as a paper for a class... however, since it relates to Baby J and my life in general, I thought I'd share it here, too...* 

I was one of the lucky ones, even if I didn’t know it at the time.

It would never have occurred to me that my parents might not let me read whatever I wanted to.

In seventh grade, part of our curriculum included the novel Annie John by Jamaica Kincaid. We had just begun to read it, and like many books we read in junior high, it honestly seemed slightly above our actual reading level. But we soldiered through, aware that we wanted to go to good high schools.

Honestly, I don’t remember much about the book. What I do remember, however, was that one day we came to school and found out that we were no longer reading it.

Suddenly, I was interested.

“Why can’t we finish it?” I asked my mother.

“Some parents complained about it,” she told me. I couldn’t fathom why they might have bothered unless they, like me, found it to be slightly boring.

The long and short of it turned out to be that the book featured a lesbian relationship. I’m otherwise unclear on the details because we hadn’t even gotten to that part. The school’s response to the challenge was to pull the book from our class and relegate it to the library.

When I complained, my parents told me I was free to check it out if I wanted. I never did, probably partially because no one in my family made much of an issue of it, and partially because I hadn’t cared much about the characters until I found out that they were evidently gearing up to have what my peers’ parents considered to be taboo sex. Now, however, I’m curious about how and why the whole thing happened.

I went to a private girls’ school in San Francisco from kindergarten through eighth grade. Our sailor-style outfits were supposed to look whimsical, but, in actuality, invited creepy comments from scary old men on the bus. It was a time of mixed messages and political correctness. (For instance, I didn’t know until many years after I graduated that some people didn’t consider themselves to be feminists.)

My school often crossed boundaries in the selection of our reading material. We read Lord of the Flies in sixth grade and I had no idea what was going on for a large portion of the class. It wasn’t until I read the book again while I prepared to student teach tenth graders that I realized its stunning impact and potential. If anything, my school challenged us with things that we weren’t quite intellectually ready for – and this killed off much of the stigma attached to controversial materials (with the glaring exception, of course, of Annie John).

My parents helped, too. When my brother and I got good report cards, they bought us each a book. As a punishment when I was in seventh grade, my mother actually took The Joy Luck Club away from me for a few days while we were on vacation. (“But Mom! What will I READ?” “You should have thought of that before you were so rude at dinner!”) I guess you could say mine was not the typical American high school experience.

For my whole life, I have considered myself to be open-minded and anti-censorship, and I have always felt pretty confident in this assessment.

After all the reading we have done and all the conversations we have had [in this class], I still feel that way. But I have added several caveats to my self-righteousness. One of the immediate strengths of the class has been its focus on the reasons why people decide to censor items in school libraries. Sadly, as is the case in most arguments, the other side is not an evil, all-encompassing Cyclops of injustice. Unfortunately, the reason most people decide they want to censor is that they feel they are doing the right thing.

It’s one of those arguments that are delicate because I, also, feel that my point of view supports the right thing.

But intellectual freedom is a topic that’s too important for us all to “agree to disagree” about.

When students aren’t able to read what they need to and want to, they’re unable to experience a world beyond their immediate boundaries – a world that they might not see in the strictly structured confines of classroom and home. They also don’t get to hear new voices. They don’t get to listen to new writing. They don’t even get the chance to sample something controversial and decide, “Hey, I don’t like this. Let me tell you why.”

Personally, I have always told my students that it’s okay not to like what they’re reading, as long as they can tell me, intelligently, why. If you hate Lord of the Flies, for instance, because it’s so very male-centric, strangely sexually violent, and dense with religious imagery, I respect that. If you hate Lord of the Flies, though, because you say it sucks, you might want to read a little bit more carefully – or at least think about which parts you find especially heinous.

I find it reprehensible to deny students the ability to interact with the texts they encounter. So much of education today is scripted. In some schools, whole books are bypassed so that teachers can focus on their supposedly most meaningful excerpts, which are then further winnowed down into fake test questions so students can improve on the STAR.

The sad thing about the way schools water English education down is that many of these students actually do read on their own time. They are thinking, feeling, emotional, and rational people. Many of them are very articulate. But at times I feel they learn more from their exposure to the literature that interests them than they do from classes where we focus on the publisher’s set opinion of truth.

Students need the freedom to decide what they are ready for and when they are ready for it – especially in the library. Reading is a relationship between a writer and a reader and there is constant give and take. The writer puts something out there for the reader. It is up to the reader to interact with the writer’s words – and if the reader doesn’t like them, he or she is free to close the book. There is perhaps no other medium more ideally suited to intellectual discourse than the process of reading. We do our children a grave disservice when we close them off from the conversation.

Still, parenthood is not something that goes according to one set plan. The only real requirements for parents are that they love their children deeply, and strive to protect them. It is difficult when the literature their children need seems to encroach on what their parents perceive as their emotional well-being.

My son is only six months old, and I am intensely protective of him. I know that parents of teenagers feel the same way – and that they strive to protect their children from the evils of the world that surrounds them. However, in this case, loving really does mean letting go. Love is made up at least in part of trust. If you can’t trust your children to read and discuss their findings with you, can you really trust yourself as a parent? The situation is touchy because of its emotional nature, but it’s also of intense importance.

The future of our world needs the opportunity to learn, to grow, and to guide their own development, at least to some degree.

I never finished Annie John in part because of my parents’ indifference in terms of whether I read it or not, and in part because I probably wasn’t ready for the book to begin with. If I had been, I doubt I would have been so bored. I was not a teenager of unique mental acumen. I’m sure that others are equally capable of finding reading material suited to their needs.

And we (myself included) need to let them step forward.