Dont Criticize what you don't or can't understand, Folks!

Young adult fiction in all its complexities, from its beauty, and pain, to it’s themes, it’s villains, it’s hero’s and all the lessons hidden in their pages, there is always something new, either a new understanding, a new insight, or just simply enjoyment to be gained from reading them. None of this is shameful, none of this is “depraved” or “dirt.” We must keep an open mind to what can be gained from reading. YA books before we, in self-righteous indignation and selfish anger try to censure a literature of which many of us do not understand. There is plenty of truth to the old saying “Don’t criticize what you can’t or don’t understand.”

I think the article from the Wall Street Journal titled: “Darkness Too Visible” by Meghan Cox Gurdon is a massive exaggeration of what some consider the “moral depravity” and “dirtying” of the youth of the United States through literature. No one is, as Gurdon claims some publishers “try to bulldoze coarseness or misery into” the lives of children. In my experience, most children much less youth these days are quite well aware of the suffering and misery of others especially those around them before they get into new adulthood. Compassion and understanding of others life circumstances including all degrees of suffering and misery is actually a crucial aspect of many peoples definitions of maturity. This full and manifest maturity is, some argue, the goal of effectively making it through adolescence into young adulthood.  I don’t think it is the role of a parent or any other gatekeeper to inhibit the intellectual, personal, creative, or any other type of healthy and effective growth and development of any child or youth.

On top of this Gurdon chooses a few of the most troubling books in the YA literature genre, while ignoring many of the less extreme books not to mention avoiding the lessons that are to be learned from even the most “depraved” books. I hasten to admit that there might be something to be learned from the kids killing kids in the Hunger Games, I just haven’t figured it out even with my interactions with a number of Hunger Game fans.

I agree entirely with Laurie Halse Anderson in her blog post “Stuck between rage and compassion”, that young adult literature saves lives ever single day. I also agree when she writes that “Kids and teens need their parents to be brave and honest to prepare them for the real world.”  

There is a world of difference between exposure and advocating. Creating an understanding and promoting an illicit or sinister act are not at the same thing.

I am reminded of my own limitations, and narrow views about the Hunger Games especially when I read Linda Holmes’s blog entry “Seeing Teenagers AS we wish they were: The Debate over YA fiction “of the similarities between Hunger Games and Lord of the Flies. I appreciated Holmes’s statement about how Shakespeare himself was quite full of controversial and potentially “depraved” themes, characters and events. 

The comfort level of the parents in terms of the newly darker and grimmer fiction of this current generation is not always going to be the same level of the teenager in terms of accepting the diversity of life experiences. This discretion discrepancy is not a viable excuse for censorship, but is in fact an indicator  of not a warning sign for increase parental involvement and care, not parental  suppression.  I would bet a lot of books that these YA books of today save and improve more lives daily then they could ever “ruin”. In terms of younger people wanting to read material which is potentially unsuitable for them I would only give advice through discussing themes, characters, subject matter and plots in book talks as I would to any person in my library. 

To respond to challenges to the dark materials I would point to the first amendment, and to the intellectual and creative freedoms for which librarians stand for.

Sources:
Anderson, L. H. (June 5, 2011). Stuck between rage and compassion (WEB). Laurie Halse Anderson.
Retrieved January 19, 2012 from http://madwomanintheforest.com/stuck-between-rage-
and-compassion/.

Gurdon, M. C. (June 4, 2011). A darkness too visible (WEB). Wall Street Journal. Retrieved January 16, 2012 from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303657404576357622592697038.html.

Holmes, L. (2011, June 6). Seeing teenagers as we wish they were:  The debate over YA fiction (WEB).   Money See, National Public Radio. Retrieved June 22, 2013 from             http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2011/06/06/137005354/seeing-teenagers-as-we-wish-they-were-the-debate-over-ya-fiction.

Nel, P. (June 5, 2011). Why Meghan can't read (WEB). Nine Kinds of Pie. Retrieved January 19, 2012 from
http://www.philnel.com/2011/06/05/cantread/.