CON explicit material
It is a fact of life that sexual crudity, violence and other such content makes its way into a great amount of literature. However, the presence of mature themes should not prevent schools from integrating these books into their curriculum if they have educational and intellectual value.
Explicit material can have a profound effect on literature. It can make a message more powerful and can leave a deeper impact on readers that clean material could otherwise not accomplish. For example, an extremely violent scene in a story (such as Macbeth getting decapitated at the end of the play) can speak much more than an exchange of insults or a kick.
Mature themes can be necessary for a quality education. Students exposed to these themes in their education will be better prepared for when they eventually encounter them in the future.
Some mature themes, such as violence, are, unfortunately, a part of life and human nature. Sheltering kids from these ideas would inhibit the growth of their mind by showing them a world of ideals instead of the world they truly live in.
They might not be able to respond effectively to a fight or emergency without ideas in their head about what actually being there feels like. Although the world isn’t necessarily filled with things like violence and danger, it does exist and cannot be ignored.
Some content does require a certain level of maturity to be handled properly, which is why younger students do need a restriction on explicit content. Older students, on the other hand, are able to receive the information in a more mature fashion, allowing works with explicit content to be used in a teaching environment.
Needlessly adding mature material to curriculums can be unnecessary and potentially harmful. Consideration should be practiced when integrating work that contains potentially disturbing content. The age of the students, the class and many other factors should be taken into consideration when designing these curriculums.
Most kids in the United States have access to the internet, an unlimited source of anything from entertainment to education.
With the scope of the internet, it is an inevitability that one will come across explicit material. Internet literacy among teens is at an all-time high, making blocking explicit material in schools in the 21st century futile and pointless, as most students are bound to encounter it.
The First Amendment protects the freedom of speech. Authors and content creators have the freedom to create however they please with whatever content they feel adds to their work. Students also have the right to learn from and consume these books. They should not be limited by a school’s attempt to shield students from the world around them.
Keeping mature themes and material away from kids is just delaying the inevitable and painting a false picture in their minds. While it may be wise to keep the most explicit things away from the youngest of hands, trusting older kids to handle these kinds of material can help them grow as people.
PRO explicit material
For decades, parents of high school students have filed complaints against numerous novels due to their excessively explicit content. Yet those novels remain on the average American student’s literature curriculum.
Although a number of books have been successfully banned from some high schools, most have been brought back by schools, claiming that this infringes on a student’s right to read. This is, however, a flawed argument.
If they wish, teenagers can easily find these banned novels from sources outside the school course. Banning these books from schools ensures that these sort of topics are not forced on students who are actually uncomfortable reading or discussing such subjects.
In the book “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” the main character is sexually harassed multiple times and raped at the age of eight. In “Brave New World,” the entire society revolves around drugs and sex. A few excerpts from this particular book include “two children, a little boy of about seven and a little girl who might have been a year older, were playing… a rudimentary sexual game” and “nine hundred older children were amusing themselves with bricks, clay modeling, and erotic play.”
Another such novel taught in Diamond Bar High School is “Oryx and Crake.” The main character narrates his history and how he came to be surrounded by the ‘perfect’ human beings amidst the dying world around them. Though the story itself is quite interesting, inappropriate content is also prevalent in this story, as there are many dark aspects to it like excessive gore and child pornography.
The amount of exposure to explicit content students encounter, to the point that they’re desensitized, is the main issue. It is clear that the majority have no qualms about reading or talking about these things, but that is exactly the problem with normalizing these topics in a school environment.
There is definitely something abnormal about an entire class of youths, who have not yet even become adults, freely discussing such topics in detail with one another. It is much more reasonable to leave that for them to explore in their own time or when they are fully independent.
There is no doubt that a number of students feel uncomfortable, or even disgusted, with being forced to read explicit content and discussing it in class for a grade. Even though I myself do not have a problem with reading about many of these topics, I have felt a certain degree of uneasiness when class discussions turn to violence, sexual activity and the like.
Given the above, parental outrage toward uncensored books is completely understandable if seen from their point of view. Even if your children are already aware of the explicit topics depicted in many novels, it would be far more disagreeable if you knew that they were being actively exposed to it in an educational environment.
In consideration of all those students and their parents who have no wish to be exposed to explicit material, it is best to have both parties sign permission slips when an uncensored novel is assigned or simply have the books stricken from the school’s curriculum. After all, there are thousands of books that have similar themes available for discussion without explicit details or language. It should not be difficult at all to find suitable alternative texts that will not upset the minds of students and parents.