It was interesting to read about other TLs experiences of censorship in schools and how they handle book challenges. As librarians, we are defenders of democracy by ensuring that the spectrum of opinions and experiences are available for our students.
Like freedom of speech, sometimes it is hard to know where the line is and everyone will have a different opinion on this. I would not want to include any hate speech in my library. I also would like to read more about “Cancel Culture” as when I understand that an author is inherently racist, I no longer wish to read their books or financially support them by purchasing their work (i.e. Sally Rooney refusing to have her books translated into Hebrew is an act of racism).
It is impossible to read all of the fiction titles before we purchase. In my context, we try to spread out our reading of fiction titles between the TLs, and the expectation is that we read at least one book per week from the Library’s YA collection (preferably in different genres).
Although I work in a faith-based school, the staff, students and parents are open-minded. Parents are just happy if their children are reading … if there is a lot of swearing or references to unsavoury behaviour in the book, I’m guessing the students would not tell their parents. We do not have a formal challenge procedure. I have asked my Library manager and she has said it has never come up. We are happy to make those decisions in-house, and the community appears to respect our professional judgment.
In my previous school, book challenges occurred over a lot of material, especially over swearing, sexual content and violence. It did not make it easy that we had the primary and secondary library all together in the one spot. Inevitably primary students were trying to borrow secondary books that were not age appropriate. For the assistants who were on circulation, some books slipped through. I do believe though that books are not the problem when it comes to swearing, sex and violence. Really, the problems are TikTok, YouTube and freely available content on the deep dark web.
I also think freedom of access to information must be taught hand-in-hand with information literacy, as we can easily access all sorts of information and opinions, but our students must learn which ones to trust, and which ones are rubbish because they are not grounded in facts and truth.
Community standards is something that TLs working in faith-based schools must be aware of, to ensure that we are not censuring for fear of reproach. We must learn to defend our choices and this comes back to having a sound selection policy.
Also interesting to consider the fact that it’s not enough simply to purchase materials, but also to make sure that cataloguing makes the resources readily available.
I am relieved to read the IFLA and ALIA statements opposing censorship in libraries, and these statements can be referred to if/when books are challenged.
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