> Our unorthodox (okay, heretical) experiment was very successful in highlighting how a simple bureaucratic decision can curb our freedom to read.
Huh? Isn't the lesson more like, "People react very badly when a bureaucracy tells them what they cannot do"?
Or, as Oscar Wilde put it: "There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."...or, in the OP's case: "Better to be censored than to be ignored"
Did anyone else in junior high/high school actively seek out the books on the Banned books list just to see what the hell was so interesting about them?
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A more relevant experiment would be to just hide certain books for a year and see if anyone notices. However, the percentage of a community that will read any one book in a year is so small that you wouldn't be able to discern any overall negative effect from hiding it.
I guess the "very successful" part was really the 8 people trying to understand the reason the book got banned, and the (few ?) other constructive responses to the announcement.
Especially if the other years' banned book weeks got no measurable reaction at all.
People on facebook reacting shallowly to some announcement should not be news.
The problem here is that it isn't 'banned' books, it's 'banned and challenged' books, which means 'any book anyone has complained about', which means Harry Potter qualifies.
You cannot tell me with a straight face that Harry Potter has been meaningfully banned in the Western world.
It's a pious lie which reduces an important topic to a laundry list of things the most extreme prigs got uptight over in the course of the past year or so. It trivializes the whole issue.
>A more relevant experiment would be to just hide certain books for a year and see if anyone notices.
How could you distinguish between a book being hidden, and the library simply not having said book, or having said book but it is accidently in the wrong section.
Well, yes, that's the thing, right? The best way to censor something is to disappear it without anyone noticing. The OP asserts that censorship is something that we can inherently discern and that the announcement of the book-banning proves it. No it doesn't. If the library were to just remove the book, people would just read some other book or do something else.
I'm not philosophically opposed to the OP, I'm just pointing out that the most dangerous censorship is the kind you aren't aware of
Huh? Isn't the lesson more like, "People react very badly when a bureaucracy tells them what they cannot do"?
Or, as Oscar Wilde put it: "There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about."...or, in the OP's case: "Better to be censored than to be ignored"
Did anyone else in junior high/high school actively seek out the books on the Banned books list just to see what the hell was so interesting about them?
----
A more relevant experiment would be to just hide certain books for a year and see if anyone notices. However, the percentage of a community that will read any one book in a year is so small that you wouldn't be able to discern any overall negative effect from hiding it.