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INTRODUCTION TO PANEL ON "CHANGE, CONTROVERSY, AND CENSORSHIP IN CONTEMPORARY CHILDREN'S LITERATURE' Taimi Maria Ranta The understatement of 1982 is that censorship in American schools and libraries is an issue of growing concern! Press accounts of angry parents, book burnings, purged textbooks, and narrowed curricula are becoming uncomfortably common. Early last year a succinct essay on "The Growing Battle of Books" appeared in Time. It began: Written words running loose have always presented a challenge to people bent on ruling others. In time past, religious zealots burned heretical ideas and heretics with impartiality. Modern tyrannies promote the contentment and obedience of their subjects by ruthlessly keeping troubling ideas out of their books and minds. Censorship can place people in bondage more efficiently than chains . Our First Amendment to the Bill of Rights, for nearly two hundred years an agent of checks and balances between the forces of freedom and repression, has kept the United States quite free (although, of course not entirely) of such situations. We, however, have had and have far more voluntary censors than we need, individuals and groups eager to protect us from the dangers of profanity, blasphemy, sedition, [and] reality (sex, etc.). The forces of censorship have become militant, organized, determined to eliminate "nothing less than everything that offends them." With the dispelling of most former taboos of language and content in books for children and young adults over the past fifteen to twenty years, we might expect that book banning and burning would be wiped out. (Was it indeed only twenty years ago that Comeback Guy by C. H. Frick stirred so much controversy with its one damn?) Censorship in the U. S., however, is definitely on the rise like a plague, killing intellectual freedom in its wake. Unfortunately many communities across this country are succumbing to hysteria over what books are being read in the schools and what books are available in the libraries. Schools and libraries are the last stand for the self-appointed, selfannointed guardians of society, places (especially the schools) where their paranoid cries can still be heard and are too often succumbed to. Only a small number of the censorship incidents, about fifteen percent at best, get into the media. To more nearly ascertain its extent and nature, the first comprehensive survey of censorship ("Book and Materials Selection for School Libraries and Classrooms: Procedures, Challenges, and Responses") was sponsored in 1980 by the Association of American Publishers, the American Library Association, and the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. The resulting study, Limiting What Students Shall Read, published in 1981, is based on questions submitted to some 7500 librarians and administrators . It reveals that about eighty-five percent of the censorship cases are not reported in the local media. Hence, they would not be monitored by the Office of Intellectual Freedom in Chicago. The American Library Association has been reporting an almost yearly increase in censorial pressures in public libraries. Judith Krug, the very effective director of the ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom, has monitored incidents of censorship in libraries for fourteen years. When the final score for 1980 was added up, more than 300 cases had been reported to her office. Also, an increase toward the end of 1980 was very conspicuous! November 4, 1980, coincided with a dramatic increase in censorship efforts. The average of three to five reported cases per week leaped to three to five a day. The 1981 figure was, as expected, even higher. The highest ever is anticipated for 1982. Judith Krug has said, "This sort of thing has a chilling effect!" It is indeed chilling to recall that in the fall of 1980, an Illinois woman stood up at a library board meeting in the Chicago suburb of Oak Lawn, holding an eight-month-old boy in her arms, and emotionally declared that if Show Me by Will McBride and Helga Fleischhauer (St. Martin's Press, 1975) was not removed from the library, little Christopher Kuberski "will not grow up to be a good American man" (whatever that means in this sexist-ridden nation). She also displayed the American flag, declaring it sacred and pledging [to] battle to curb the destruction of...

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