Censorship In Public Schools

The public education system in the United States needs to redesign how teachers in English and other subjects create assigned reading assignments for their students. Teachers often do not think about what books their students might enjoy reading when creating assignments for assigned reading and instead choose one book for the entire class to read even though most students may not enjoy the book instead of giving their students a choice between two or three different books that students might enjoy. During the first week of class teachers can give their students surveys that ask the students about when topics and genres they enjoy reading about the most so the teacher will have time to find books that their students will enjoy. In addition,

Today parents, teachers, and other adults are attempting to remove any works of literature from libraries and bookstores if they include any topics that some people may find offensive (Silvey, 1994). Teachers and librarians often refuse literature that they deem to be “emotionally inappropriate, “adhering to the traditional and mostly prevailing view that children’s literature should avoid all controversial topics (Ringel, 2016). Works of literature that include controversial topics should be banned from elementary schools where children tend to be between the ages of four and eleven due to the fact that they are not mature enough to understand a book like To Kill a Mockingbird where racism and slavery is discussed. However; some books with certain controversial topics should not be banned from middle schools if they discuss past and current issues such as racism and segregation since most kids will be able to understand that those issues are not okay and the books can teach students about past issues that plagued the United States and other countries. The increased amount of censorship among society

In school censorship negatively affects a teacher’s ability to try all possibilities to “motivate and reach out to students by limiting their resources and flexibility”. By limiting topics that can be brought up during class discussions, “censorship takes creativity and vitality out of the art of teaching” and limits teachers to teach in ways that has to be one of the “pre-approved exercises”(NCAC, 2017), creating a learning environment that is boring to students and limits their ability to learn material in a way that they understand. In 2014, people proposed new textbooks for history classes for public schools located in Texas that heavily censor and modify how the nation’s history and “Western political tradition” is taught to students. Several government and world history textbooks “exaggerate the Judeo-Christian influence on the nation’s founding” and include “misleading information that undermines the Constitutional concept of separation of church and state”. While numerous world geography and history textbooks include false, biased information that negatively portray Islam and Muslims (Strauss,