Book Banning in the San Ramon Valley

What about teaching students how to think for themselves?

(SAN FRANCISCO, CA.) - San Ramon Valley Unified School District in California is embroiled in a growing nationwide debate over book bans.

Around the country, parents are increasingly clashing with librarians and school districts over book bans, demanding titles they find inappropriate — often with LGBTQ content — be removed from shelves.

In the San Ramon Valley case the controversy is about “Gender Queer: A Memoir” by Maia Kobabe.

The main purpose of education is to help students become critical thinkers. With the basic information, young people can make informed choices. Otherwise, young people will often turn to biased or false sources of information found abundantly, for example, in social media.

We should be worried that students are not getting the help they need to acquire improved reasoning skills.

By banning books, schools undermine one of the primary functions of education: teaching students how to think for themselves.

Do you remember the Index Librorum Prohibitorum ("List of Prohibited Books"), a list of publications deemed heretical or contrary to morality by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and Catholics were forbidden to read them?

As a youngster, I remember some of my Catholic friends telling me that the "List" was a great source of a good read.

Actually, the best way to protect our children’s “innocence” is to take away their access to the Internet and lock them up until they reach age 18 or move to Texas.

To better protect children, and adults as well, we should ban guns, instead of books.