Ringel and the Value of Diverse Children's Novels

 Paul Ringel’s “How Banning Books Marginalizes Children” really gets to the heart of what bothers me personally about the trend of banning books. Ringel explains how book banning has been used to shelter kids from different kinds of experiences for centuries. Early children-focused entertainment tried to distance itself from any kind of content that could be considered questionable in the eyes of adults. As time has gone on, and society has slowly inched towards progressivism, creators have been more willing to introduce these “taboo” topics to children, but parents are still resistant. Ringel argues that restricting children from diverse subject matter is rooted in bigoted 19th-century white, Christian philosophy and that children actually benefit from engaging with these “complicated” materials. 

Ringel points out how children’s literature has often been used to introduce complicated and diverse perspectives to wider audiences—specifically citing R.J. Palacio’s 2012 hit novel Wonder. I was assigned Wonder as summer reading in middle school and I remember really enjoying it. It tells a great story about a young boy with a facial deformity. I remember feeling a lot of empathy for Augie, and I assume many of my classmates did too. It makes me wish that my grade school assigned more novels with these kinds of diverse perspectives. Most of the times in grade school and early high school that I was assigned books with difficult content matter, they still revolved around a white perspective. I wish my school assigned more books like Wonder, Drama or The Hate U Give. While I feel like everything ended up okay for me, I wish I had been exposed to more perspectives outside of my own narrow, white male one in my younger years.