Sara Kaloudis
Woods
Eng 101- 035
November 20, 2008
“What the -BLEEP-!?”
Censorship in The United States is widely used in schools and in the media to control chaos. Censorship’s “central characteristic is the suppression of an idea or image because it offends or disturbs someone, or because they disagree with it.” (Criscola). This is largely targeted towards children. This necessity for censorship, however, is not demanded by children, but by their parents. Values or ideas that differ from their own presents a problem. Parents feel that if their children are exposed to uncensored material they will stray from a responsibly safe lifestyle and ultimately create a state of chaos. Censoring shelters children’s learning relating to sexual content, scientific theories, and expression through music. Resulting in the demotion of the broadening of children’s minds and can often counteract in children rebelling against these restrictions and creating chaos.
Sexual education in most schools, if present, censor sexual activity and mainly promote abstinence. Whether parents want to believe or not, children in the twenty first century are growing and maturing at a much faster rate than they did. “child development experts say that physical and behavioral changes that would have been typical of teenagers decades ago are now common among "tweens" — kids ages 8 to 12.” (Margot). Kids start going on dates and wearing make-up much sooner. Sex becomes a topic that they start questioning fresh out of elementary school. Parents blame a lot of that on commercialism or images they see on television. The fact of the matter is that children are attracted to these images, they are not as naive as their parents like to believe. Not teaching them about their body, their development, or how to stay safe will force them to learn elsewhere, not maintain their innocence. This sensitivity of sex in schools is shown in the controversy over materials such as Judy Blume’s novels Forever and...