Mark Johnson 1084 Boylston St.

Boston, MA 11/23/2013 School Board of Crook County High School Crook County High School 1100 SE Lynn Blvd Prineville, OR Dear School Board of Crook County, I am writing to express my discontent with your decision to ban Sherman Alexies novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian. While I agree in principle with the decision youve made, in reality, censorship and withholding of knowledge only makes our society less able to deal with its problems. Most of these problems are deeply rooted in our culture, such as racism and bullying. The best way to uproot these detriments is to ensure that our youth are properly educated in the subject matter, which involves exposing them to it. Ive grown up around small children, and I totally understand how stressful it can be to protect our younger ones from inappropriate subject matter. I completely agree that early on in life, it is wise to play a large role in what goes into those still-developing brains. What I dont understand or agree with, however, is the attempt to protect our adolescents from offensive material. First of all, what does offensive even mean in such a context? Because the adolescent certainly isnt offended when he/she reads a novel about a child being bullied for racist reasons. Nor are they offended when they read about sexual themes; they themselves are just beginning to understand and connect with their bodies. If you need evidence of this, just ask any pediatrician. Im sure hell tell you all about how damaging offensive material is to the cerebral cortex of a developing child. Restricting such knowledge and teaching our adolescents that such things dont happen is not going to protect them. If anything, it is going to make them less likely to be able to deal hardships later on. For example, an adolescent with little to no violent exposure is not going to understand how to deal with a bully properly. In the novel, Junior handles his bullies with courage and respect. While it is unfortunate that bullying occurs in our world, simply telling our children to ignore it and pretend is doesnt exist will have a detrimental effect on our society as a whole. They will get the idea that if you ignore something long enough, it will go away, and that attitude will carry onto into their adult lives. If our children could see the difficult emotions on both sides of the bullying situation, and an appropriate reaction, then it would instill in their psyches an idea of how to deal with such an encounter should one ever happen to them. To inadequately educate them means a repetition of history; from Columbine to Virginia Tech (both of which were partly precipitated by bullying), we know all too well the consequences. We should empower our youth; not coddle them until theyre on their own.

To illustrate how absurd this censorship truly is, we should look no further than Crook County High School, Oregon. Apparently, one parent was dissatisfied and disgusted with Alexies reference to masturbation in the novel, cited some examples out of context to you, and had the book pulled from the library. Dear sir/maam: Id like to ask how truly offended you think you wouldve been if you were an adolescent and not a middle-aged man or woman. This may be shocking to you, but I am going to tell you that the majority of adolescents have masturbated before, and are fully aware of how the process works. We truly are delusional if we believe that censoring masturbation is going to stop our children from figuring it out on their own, or if we believe it will somehow make them perverts if theyre exposed to subject matter that includes it. Further, Id like to ask how many of the individuals involved in banning the book have actually read it in its entirety. As most of you lead very busy lives Im sure, I doubt (as does Alexie) that you have a holistic idea of what the book is about and what message it conveys. To take something out of context and request a ban based on that out-of-context reading is like asking a jury to consider just a single piece of evidence and pay no attention to what all the evidence/facts together mean. It skews ones perception of reality. Yet the school boards of Stockton, Missouri and Richland, Washington apparently also see this as an acceptable form of democracy, and have taken steps to have the book banned in a manner virtually identical. This may sound direct (I mean to offend no one), but if I were to make an assessment of the situation, it seems to me like those school boards who have made a decision to ban the book are cowards intimidated by overprotective Im-not-afraid-to-sue parents. My only intention in writing this letter is to improve our educational system and our society as a whole. I want to end this mass cultural schizophrenia of trying to censor and suppress subject matter for our children and then expecting them to be ready for anything that comes at them in the real world. Perhaps certain topics can wait a bit for very young children (theres no need to educate a 7-year-old on human reproduction), but we are kidding ourselves if we decide this for our adolescents as well. I strongly disagree with your decision to ban The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, and Ill even go as far to assert that youre wrong: you have not looked at it from the perspective of an adolescent. Very, very few of you have actually read the book either, and therefore your understanding is limited and your judgment is not sound. While I would implore you to un-ban the book, that is not my decision to make, so instead Ill ask that you simply acquire all the facts possible, look at the situation from all possible angles, and then make a firm and decisive choice, unhindered by the potential consequences. All the best, Mark Johnson