What do The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, and Animal Farm all have in common? If you guessed they all are classics, that’s correct, but they also are all book which have been censored, challenged, and banned many times. Challenging a book is an attempt to restrict it, based upon the objections of a person. Banning is the removal of those books. Since 1982, there has been more than 11,300 books that have been challenged. Due to various reasons such as, not following the First Amendment, ignorance of people, and hiding the realities of the world to children, we need ban censorships on books. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, freedom of speech can be defined as, “ the right to express information, ideas, and opinions free of government restrictions based on content and subject only to reasonable limitations”. Putting censorships and banning books is unconstitutional because it directly goes against our First …show more content…
By “protecting” children this way, what they truly are doing is just hiding them from the realities and hardships of the everyday world. According to the American Library Association, some reasons for books to be challenged are racism, sexism, drugs, offensive language, sexually explicit, violence, suicide, religious point of view, and much more. Raising kids like these things don’t exist, is going to give them false assumptions of the world and they will have a harder understanding of life when they get older. Also, parents think that if a kid reads something, then they are going to copy the behavior. However, National Coalition Against Censorship, talks about how this is a myth and that, “ Kids intuitively understand that novels, like life, are not always what they first may seem”. Books are much more than something kids need to be protected from. By censoring books, it is hindering children's’ educational