I kinda wish I had kids so I could inflict that technique on them.

I’ve never understood how educated is so valued in the same society that seems bent on “punishing” those whose pursuits are more intellectual than the “norm”.

I have a friend who is close to getting his teaching degree, and he’s described lectures about special education, and he was telling me how bizarre it was to hear about how smart kids are being classified as “special needs”. In other words, “smart” equals “developmentally disabled” in some circles because of the “challenge” of “accommodating” those kids- smart kids are a problem because it takes extra work for the adults to dumb things down enough to discourage them.

I often wonder if what goes on in our society can actually be called censorship- we don’t have thugs in brown shirts kicking in doors or people sporting “451″ emblems on their uniforms coming to people’s homes, but people aren’t encouraged to have a passion for knowledge beyond what’s required to get by in school- no one tells kids what not to read in an overt way, but look at the anti-intellectual messages in our culture here in the US. There’s something I call “enlightened ignorance”, where someone will claim moral superiority because they aggressively avoid things they deem too “smart”.

I get making sure one’s interests are well-rounded, but it’s totally asinine when adults complain that kids don’t read enough only to turn around and treat the same kids as antisocial when they get fired up enough to read on their own.

(This, from someone only vaguely ‘universal mind’ spiritual, in Australia, which is not exactly the religion capital of the world. The 80′s hysteria whipped up by the media over RPGs had a lot to do with it, and showed me how intelligent people can easily buy into poorly constructed, unresearched arguments, just because it ‘feels right’ or has ‘common sense’, or worst of all ‘it’s on the news’.)

I wonder if I might have read Ghandi’s book if it hadn’t been pushed on me, but I doubt it – I read non-fiction for specific purposes, and I haven’t had a need to learn about colonial India yet. Would I have continued to read all the great fiction I read without the snide parental comments? Yep, after all I started reading that sort of thing years before I got into the adult material.

Real censorship, of which Ieva speaks, I haven’t had to deal with too much, although Australia has shown an inclination to ban some materials and filter the internet, and that is somewhat shocking to me. Most of that happened since I left just under a decade ago, however I do recall some video game and movie censorship happening beforehand. At the time I pretty much thought it made sense in certain cases – that there was no need for such extremely violent imagery, and it might ‘harm people’s minds’. Since, it has occurred to me that it is very easy to fall into lame double-standards, for example the presence of a penis (gasp!) in a US movie is stunningly shocking, but tearing someone’s arms from their living body barely asks for an R rating. And the same occurs between different media versions of the same content; consider unrestricted books vs. age-limited movies.

What’s the solution? Should everything be available to everyone? My gut feeling (about as reliable as common sense) is that everything should be available to adults, but it’s reasonable to restrict any form of media from minors according to age (although the rules should be CONSISTENT, not one rule for movies, one for games, one for books, etc., etc.). Then the parents have the choice to override that restriction, either by buying the material themselves, or providing the necessary permissions. If it’s motivating for the kids to get access to restricted materials, then that’s normal. We all like to buy into taboos because it makes exploring them more fun, but even if minors do then access material that others, or even their parents, consider inappropriate, it at least lets them view it from the perspective of ‘your parents think this may be harmful’, and maybe that will cause them to think about what they experience, instead of just absorbing it mindlessly.

Why not have everything available to everyone, regardless of age? Simply put, what we experience changes us. There’s an argument to protect the children that to my mind really makes sense, but we have to have some leeway to say that parents have the right to parent their children. I just see it as best to have an opt-in system, where potentially harmful material is inaccessible by default, then parents can override that, rather than the other way around. Maybe I’m wrong though. I can certainly see how some young adult material might be restricted that would be helpful for the kids to read, so perhaps levels of restriction need to take into account clear benefits that may make certain works more accessible. I don’t know, I don’t have all the answers, just lots of words (too much!).

The last thing I would like to say is that I don’t feel I have enough evidence myself. I would like to see some scientific research about the consequences of censorship, and some time when I’m not in the middle of nano and Thanksgiving I will probably track it down. So take everything I say from that perspective: opinion that is not backed up with citations, yet

We both love ISBW too. Thanks for the interesting read.

leva, “censorship” actually means “oh no — the little people are beginning to see us for the bigots we are. What to do? Oh, yes, scare the little people with threats of awful things, carry some out, and then intimidate/kill/jail enough of them to put this uprising to an end.”

Until the next time, of course, and there is always a next time. Why?

Because the little people in the death camps may have disappeared, but those little disappeared people turned into one hell of a reminder of what to do when everything points to “nothing can be done.”

FYI, censorship doesn’t really mean “if you read and discuss this, you’ll get the country-wide fame for being revolutionary”. Censorship means “if you read and discuss this, you get a good chance to be exiled to a subarctic climate, die in labor camp, and say thanks we didn’t take your toddler and your 80-year old grandma with you, and no, people won’t talk or write about you. You’ll just disappear”.

Thank you for the nostalgia.

Now all I need is a list of books to forbid my son to read…

Spinderfly doesn’t need encouragement.