I feel like ranting tonight.
I think Pullman is inapropriate for most children. Right now I've been working on a literacy curriculum for teaching meaning/content to children. One challenge we've had is there is a lot of diversity in what childen understand. So in trying to select appropriate works becomes a challenge because there isn't a lowest-common denominator. So we go for the middle usually.
I do agree that parents ought to be informed about the content of a book before allowing a child to read it. However, I'm surprised with how many parents are competely clueless as to how much their child really understands (I'd estimate about a third of the parents in a given class). This is more often the case with low-performing cildren as opposed to average or above-average children (a typical class will have 3 below average children for every 1 above average children). It's particularly with parents who were above-average themselves but have a child that is below-average.
Course, measuring a child's understanding is problematic and usually requires repeated individualized testing. However, it also gets complicated in that adults bring massive bias to the testing, usually building off of pre-concieved notions of whether the child with score well or not. There's a lot of high-order thinking that has to be tested when analyzing a child's understanding of meaning, however many adults either think low-level thinking skills are actually higher-order skills or do the opposite (rater reliability becomes crucial here).
I guess I'm for censorship in an ideal sense. More like selective censorship, though I doubt it could actually happen. In an ideal world--parents, teacher, librarians, and school administators would get the right books to the right kids and keep out the wrong books from the wrong kids. However, that requires a lot of judgement and like many contemporaries, I find little faith in the judgements of humankind.
My pragmatic side says--censorship happens. Sometimes it is justified and other times it is cruel. But it happens and will continue to happen no matter what administators or politicians do. In public schools we've already censored out swear words, verbal abuse, negative comments, harsh criticism, home economics, prayers, the pledge of allegience, and most fine art forms. (Well, maybe not the swear words)
The sociologist part of me tends to think everytime I hear a writer whine about censorship, it's really a plea for more power. They want the power to decide what people read, and censequently think. It's in their best interest for people to be readers and even more so to be their readers. For a writer, to be censored is probably a humiliating and frustrating thing. It's a big slap in the face to their ideas. Course, if you say something that's going to offend a large portion of the culture to which you belong (like offend the 90% of U.S. citizens that follow a religion, or refere to everyone that doesn't live in a large city as a hick) then you deserve to be censored if purely for being a social idiot. A good writer should have enough social sense to tactfully present their ideas to the masses without getting mobbed or starting a riot. Writers are free to express themselves in this country and free to take responsibility for what they express without the government getting involved. The more they complain about mistreatment the sooner the priveledge of self-expression will be taken away.
