[Kalimac]

Kalessin, great (and mind-twisting) post [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]. The only caveat I'd have is a very minor one; I'm in the US and remember a lot of controversies over random bannings of HP (though "Huckleberry Finn" has to hold the title for the book which has been banned, un-banned and argued over ad nauseum).

For the first question, well, first of all it depends on what you think of as a valid reason. The trouble is that there's pretty much nobody in the world who thinks an opinion that he holds is NOT valid; otherwise he wouldn't hold that opinion in the first place. Someone who runs an extremely fundamentalist school might see any book that portrays wizards and magic (for example) in a good light as a serious threat to the moral fiber of his charges - who knows what ideas may creep into their heads. To most people - and to me - this would seem fairly silly - let the kids read what they like, tell them your opinion and if you think something is wrong, but let them at least see the stuff to widen their literary scope - but to him/her these books would seem like the equivalent of hardcore pornography, which you also wouldn't want most middle-schoolers getting hold of even if it did technically widen their magazine-reading scope, so to speak.

For me, I agree with Lush for the most part; no book should not be banned unless it is either a proven inciter of violence or - and I'm saying this carefully - has serious potential to become one. I mean this last bit for serious hard cases; for example, a fantasy novel which is largely based on the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" or something like that. I do NOT mean books which can be "metaphorically interpreted" as having unpleasant political agendas, since metaphor is something the reader has to decide for himself, and besides, if someone was really determined, he could make a case for "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" as covert Nazi propaganda. The only circumstance I can think of in which it would be wise for a school to ban Tolkien (or at least to not officially countenance the books, never mind what you do behind closed doors) - or 99.99% of the other books out there - would be if people were in physical danger from being known to have the books in their possession; think importing copies of "The Gulag Archipelago" into the USSR in the 1970s. I don't know if there's a country in the world now where fantasy books on Tolkien's line are forbidden (for witchcraft, Westernism, whatever - think Pol Pot's Cambodia, when being shown to speak a foreign language could mean death) I certainly hope there isn't. But if there is, banning such works officially from school would an understandable, if not movie-heroic, choice.

For allowing Tolkien to be the one exception - can't see the way to that either, unless you have your students on a Great Books program and aren't allowing them to read anything written after 1960 (and that's a different kettle of fish anyway). For Ray Bradbury - please don't smack me, but I've read so little of him that I can't really comment on why or why not he may have been banned, I'll only say that it was probably the same dreary process as Huckleberry Finn and myriad others; somebody took offense at some passage or other which contradicted the beliefs they thought valid, and they happened to be someone who (like certain of my clients) was willing to make everyone's life a torture until they got their way. I don't mean to be flippant; very often it really is that way.

Sorry, hope this is coherent - up late and have to work tomorrow (Thanksgiving holiday, what's that? Arrghh).

[ November 29, 2002: Message edited by: Kalimac ]