Censorship In One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

The first amendment in the United States is freedom of speech, many people may question how far this freedom goes. Censorship conflicts with the right for anyone to express how they feel. There are many pieces of literature that have been censored or even banned in schools for its content. If students are being sheltered from the 'real world', what is the point of educating them in the first place. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest should not be banned or censored in high schools, because it's controversial topics are essential to understand.
Censorship is the suppression of words that can be interpreted as offensive. Due to the first amendment right, censorship is considered unconstitutional when done by the government, yet when done by a private group it is supported by the first amendment. That means there is a fine line between censorship being wrong and censorship being okay. The only way something should even be censored is when speech becomes clearly hazardous to the nation's wellbeing. For example pornography is often wanted to be used as a reason for censoring, yet the term is not a legal term at all. (ACLU staff Web n.p.). With that in mind, just because a book has something involving sexual desire does not give anyone

In the story the African American black men are referred to as boys, coons, niggers rather than men or their names. (Karolides, Bald, Sova 478). "Neither the big lifeguard nor McMurphy nor the two black boys could pry him loose."(Kesey 18). Although these terms towards people of color were very present in the literature we have to remember that the time period in which this was published, those racial slurs were a very big part of the tongue of the time. To censor that specific language would be like censoring history, students should understand the time period in which the piece of literature took place in and how far we have come as a collective so that we never go