[Vision2020] "Proposal would let schools ban books"

[David Douglas]

Visionaries:

It would be helpful to define censorship and the implications inherent in 
it.

I'm not a legal expert, so if someone is and wishes to correct me, fine.  I 
see one word with two scopes.

Narrowly defined, it is the _government_ actively preventing people from 
speaking/writing etc or from hearing/reading someone who has legitimately 
spoken under the 1st ammendment.  Just because something is kept out of a 
library doesn't make it censored in this sense. There is no constitutional 
right to have tax dollars actively fund the dissemination of free speech.

Even if you argued that a public library must not forbid these books, would 
it follow that keeping them out of public school libraries was censorship?  
Different parts of government have different functions.  I don't see the 
Treasury department deploying troops in Iraq.

In the wide sense of the word, its making a decision for whatever reason 
that certain speech is not appropriate for a particular forum.  Aren't we 
employing this type of censorship, actively or passively,  already by making 
values/economic judgements on what to put into _any_ library.  If not, can 
teenage boys check out the back issues of Playboy, or do they have to read 
those in the high school library just like the current issue?

And even if it were censorship in the narrow sense, also aren't 9-12th 
graders _different_ than adults?  Shouldn't some decisions about what they 
read not belong to them?  We do it in other areas.  If this is not 
agreeable, we may want, to be consistent about this, to begin by eliminating 
the drinking age restrictions.  That way high school student will have all 
the rights of adults--including not being able to drink alcohol in public 
parks.

I just want to advocate for precise usage of this word.  Unless I've missed 
the boat on these definitions, narrow-sense censorship is not the issue.  
And wide-sense censorship will inevitably mean value judgments.  You may 
think my example is extreme, but it wouldn't be if teenage boys could choose 
the reading material for the library anonymously.

The fact is, this kind of discussion will always be about value judgments 
and _who_ makes them.  Those who do choose what to put in a library 
_invariably_ make some value judgement.  Would we be having this discussion 
if someone wanted to ban do-it-yourself munitions handbooks from that same 
library?


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