Hey guys! My journal isn’t totally finished. I need a paragraph to wrap up the 2 different ideas I went for in this post, along with the reading it came from but i’m struggling a little bit to figure out what I want to say. Let me know if you think the flow of this essay is ok and if I should make any changes!

Rob Boston’s, “Fanning the Flames: The ‘Golden Age’ of American Book Burning” delves into the detail of book burning when it was in its most popular time to book burning now, in the twenty-first century. Boston speaks not only about the act of book burning itself, but the message behind it that is still heavily prevalent today. In class rooms ranging from first grade to high school, parents and different organizations have attempted to censor thousands of books from our learning facilities.

Boston’s essay opens with a story of a fundamentalist pastor’s attempt to burn the Harry Potter series books. When the pastor finds out he is unable to burn the books on public property, he’s quick to think up another way of destroying them with scissors, just to get his point across. Book burnings are virtually useless in today’s society, where books are mass produced by the thousands, not to mention the different technology devices we all have and use that are able to access almost any book we could possibly think of. So why are they still going on? It’s clear that even though the effectiveness of book burnings has died, the ideals behind it clearly have not. Book burnings today are still used to display that some people truly believe not all knowledge should be readily available to the children of our society.

Censored books in a classroom setting is a concept, that I unfortunately believe, will never die down. While parents feel an understandable need to censor what their child watches, reads, and sees in such heavily developmental stages, it hinders some of their ability to learn and the growth they would receive from that. Presenting information to children in a way that makes the content appropriate for their age, developmental stage, and ability to process could be vital to the type of person they will grow up to be. If we continue to become more so wearier of banning books than we already are, to keep from exposing children to certain ideologies, there will be almost nothing left for them to read. It is vital that children learn about diversity in different ways and learning it through reading could potentially be one of the most important of them.

Boston says, “Although it’s not widely discussed today, the United States has a long, embarrassing history of religiously based censorship. Some books now considered classics were simply unavailable for decades due to pressure from religious communities or actions by self-appointed and legally dubious municipal boards that sought to suppress “vice”” It shows through our history how censorship has effected what can and cannot be read by students. The sad reality of the fact is that most students will not take the time to read classics outside of the classroom setting, and if we continue to remove them to leave sexual content, religious ideas, inappropriate language, etc., out of the classroom setting then the classics and books of importance will slowly start to die out of our culture. If books and appropriate learning content continue to get increasingly censored children are basically getting nothing of use to them in the real world, and without that, what is truly the point of sitting in a classroom for seven hours of their day?

While Harry Potter books have never been a staple in the classroom setting, they are a huge phenomenon of their own, that come with organizations and parents wanting to ban them all the same. J.K. Rowling has taken several hits from organizations like this, that state her books are corrupting our children into believing in magic, when apparently, that is the worst thing a child in this day in age could be doing. Rowling’s books age as they go on, and yes, the content does get darker, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t anything for children of varying ages to handle. Rowling was able to create a story and world of her own that kept readers completely on their toes from the interest they sparked in our own imagination. Along with the fact that she was able to create a great story, there are countless lessons in Harry Potter that children learn in subtle ways from reading it. Harry Potter teaches the importance of bravery, selflessness, friendship, love, and the importance of learning. Personally, I don’t understand why parents don’t jump at the fact to get their children interested in Harry Potter to not only sharpen their brains and make them smarter just from reading so much content, but the lessons of right from wrong it teaches them to show them the type of person they should strive to be.