Thread: Farenheit 451
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Old 12-04-2002, 10:06 PM   #42
Mhoram
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I'm of the opinion some censorship is necessary for children, the above posts give many valid reasons why, so i'll not regurgitate those. Working from the premise that censorship for children is necessary I turn my attention to the question of who should decide what and how much should be censored and to whom at what age.

I think it is obviously to respect parents as the ultimate authority in regards to their children's best interests, this includes the matter of censorship. Parents can be expected to make these decisions according to their own moral and ethical standards, the only other recourse they have that I can see is to unthinkingly bow to some previously decided status quo. Such a status quo could be simply letting the schools do whatever they see fit, another example might be the morals of Bible or the Church's morals. Not a responsible course of action by any means, but I won't address that now, being a volatile can of worms.

By choice of the parents their children are put into the care of school teachers and administrators for the purpose of teaching and development of character. This includes acknowledgement the school's authority to impart censoring as it sees fit. But, if the parent is truly responsible s/he will pay constant attention to the teachings and guides employed by the school. A parent's use of a school as a tool for the teaching of his or her child doesn't negate or even diminish his or her responsiblity and ultimate authority in the matters of his or her child's upbringing. Therefore the schools should be to a point accountable to the parents it serves. The problem obviously arises with having many parents to accomodate, these parents often having different morals and thus having conflicting expectations of what and how the school should teach.

If the morals of the majority of parents goes against the morals of a small minority of parents and this disagreement cannot be satisfactorily reconciled, the minority may be forced to take their children out of said school and pursue some other means of teaching, be it a different school or home schooling. This seems to be the best practical means of pleasing the most people without resorting to dumbing teaching down to nothingness. This implies relative morality, but this is currently the only way to function, as we havn't quite decided on set of morals that are acceptable to all humans. This is the best way I can see of dealing out the needed censorship to youth without dangerously leaving the matter in the hands of a very few.

On the related note of relative morals and ethics: the comments about a government institution and it's supposed christian base when deciding on censorship matters. The way I see it, schools are tools funded by the tax payers, endowed with certain restrictions and guidelines by the goverment, but then left to be willed by the people that it serves, the local community. This is a largely Christian country and so you will see largely Christian morals, these morals merely find their way into representation in the school system as it naturally bends to the will of the community. It's just representing the morals held by the local majority, not acting on it's own Christian religious beliefs.

[ December 04, 2002: Message edited by: Mhoram ]
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