Self-censorship can be a beneficial thing.  It’ll keep you from looking like an ass at inopportune moments and pretty much keep your dignity intact.  But when it comes to school librarians self-censoring for the sake of the children, we have a completely different issue.

Especially in this economy, I can understand walking on egg shells and playing nice with the school board when they “highly recommend” that a book not get bought for their library because a job is better than no job.  But the ones that do it out of fear of backlash from the parents or even because they themselves don’t agree with the text is a censoring best left to their own children.

In a poll conducted by the School Library Journal, a sampling of school librarians of all school levels from all over the country were anonymously polled about their censoring.  That poll shows, among other things, that school librarians won’t shelve a book due to the potential threat from parents, this overwhelmingly over any kind of reaction from the administration.  Now what does that say?  That parents need to keep parenting to their own children maybe?

It’s bad enough when parents come out and officially challenge a book, or succeed in getting a book officially banned (honestly, that have to know that it has the adverse effect on their intentions) but when librarians refuse to even let the book out in the open for fear of repercussion is hitting a little below the belt.  I’m the only one that should be dictating what my child can and can not read, not some worm with nothing better to do than organize a rally to get a perfectly good book banned because she doesn’t like the word scrotum in it.  It’s not like it was on every page.  It was said once.  Ooo!

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