Censoring books that deal with difficult, adolescent issues does not protect anybody. Quite the opposite. It leaves kids in the darkness and makes them vulnerable. Censorship is the child of fear and the father of ignorance. Our children cannot afford to have the truth of the world withheld from them
Interpretation
Censoring difficult topics in books harms children's understanding and growth.
This quote emphasizes the importance of providing young people with access to literature that addresses challenging and complex issues. By censoring these topics, society not only fails to protect children but also limits their ability to learn and understand the world around them, ultimately fostering ignorance and vulnerability.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of free speech in education.
Memory cuts both ways; it can either provide you with tremendous strength and a foundation to carry you through your life, or it can be a demon that just ruins your present and your future because you can’t let go of the past.
Here stands a girl clutching a knife. There is grease on the stove, blood in the air, and angry words piled in the corners. We are trained not to see it, not to see any of it. . . . Someone just ripped off my eyelids.
This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses. The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close.
A breath of steam trickles out, filled with the sobs of a grown woman breaking into girl-sized pieces.
I open a paperclip and scratch it across the inside of my left wrist. Pitiful. If a suicide attempt is a cry for help, then what is this. A whimper, a peep? I draw little window cracks of blood, etching line after line until it stops hurting.
If I can write a book that will help the world make a little more sense to a teen, then that's why I was put on the planet.
To be a well-favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.
We can all agree that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, all children should have the basic nutrition they need to learn and grow and to pursue their dreams, because in the end, nothing is more important than the health and well-being of our children... These are the basic values that we all share, regardless of race, party, religion. This is what we share. These are the values that this bill embodies.
How do we redefine education so that 30-50 percent of inner-city children do not drop out of school, thus ensuring that millions will end up in prison?
Before the web and these highly focused entities, journalists got to decide what was important to tell their audience and educated their readers. Now, journalists have to try and understand what their consumer actually wants to read and what angle they are looking for in order to keep audiences engaged in a highly competitive world.
Where educators are raising and combining their voices, the seeds of positive change have emerged. Collective voice, exercised through the union, is power - the power to drive real change for our kids, families and communities.
When you're young, you keep reading new writers and you keep changing your mind about how you ought to sound.
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