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 Faith Tyranski Dr. Ellis Banned Books  Blog Post  Ringel on Banning Books Throughout this semester, our class has been developing a working storyline, which details how books come to be banned, but moreover why people actively seek to ban books. One reoccurring part of our discussions centered around how parents or school administrators seek to ban books in their children's libraries or even books that are specifically targeted towards children. Ringel notes that "since the inception of the American children’s literature industry in the 1820s, publishers have had to grapple with the question of who their primary audience should be," and our class expanded on this idea, to incorporate the factor of maturity and autonomy. Building upon that initial claim by Ringel has enabled us to understand the banning of books as going beyond trying to segregate books based on target audiences, but rather as an attempt to halt progression, awareness, and systemic change.  When...
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Key takeaways of the semester

 Some of the things I was most surprised about in "Banned Books" this semester is just how uninformed those looking to ban books are on the books they are looking to ban. Book Banning gives power to people whether they deserve it or not, and no critical reading is required for the words of ignorant parents to have power in what they teach their kids. I was in no way surprised by how fearful and close minded parents can be, but I was frankly flabbergasted by their lack of trust in the education system. So many parents seems to spout off the importance of education without understanding he importance of anything their children learn. "For a career," they may say. I was told the same thing my whole life, that you go to school and try your best simply because its what you need to do. These parents have no understanding of what education truly is for, and yet they are given the power to ban the things they don't want their children to see.  In the wake of the outcry ...
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Key Takeaways

One big takeaway from this class is that a lot of the books we see being banned are ones from diverse perspectives that do not align with the traditional, white male-dominated, hetero-normative standards of society. It seems as if a lot of these bannings come from a place of fear of change and a fear of elevating the voices that our society has squashed from the start. People do not want to acknowledge the privilege that some carry and how that has shaped the world we see today, and many feel that this can be brought up through conversations surrounding these banned books. Overall, I think it is important to really analyze a text and its reasons for being banned in order to get to the heart of the argument being made because it is much deeper than just banning books. A second takeaway is to evaluate who is really affected by banning these books. It is one thing to have a book be banned and to assess and acknowledge why it truly was banned, but it does not do as much good if time is not...
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