by Isolde Marion

Created on: February 13, 2009   Last Updated: February 19, 2009

Intellectual freedom is one of the strongest concepts to ever emerge from western civilization. We know what banning, censoring, rating and even hiding forms of expression do to a society. From book burning to book mutilation these so-called control mechanisms only hurt society's evolution and education.

Today, the concept giving a rating to a book to warn about inappropriate content is so absurd that it should trigger alarms in every educational setting. Citizens must prevent this sort of thing, especially in this day and age.

The American Library Association has done tremendous work promoting intellectual freedom for everyone, it's certainly not the time to undo its achievements.

And what does Intellectual Freedom mean?

It's the freedom to think, learn and share ideas.

A civilized world depends on the education of its people. Fundamental education begins by reading and as we grow up we learn, through reading and guidance how to make our own judgements. We read to learn, educate and entertain ourselves but also to be aware of the not-so-rosy world that unfortunately surrounds us. By reading books of all levels and literary styles we form our own view of good and bad and when a person's liberty to do so is severed, distortion takes place and thus the inevitable: reading out of morbid curiosity.

A child or teen won't go to the library and ask for a book with a big red "R" stamped on it. Obviously he or she won't take it to the counter and check it out. Most likely he or she, if her curiosity is strong enough, will sit in a corner and proceed to read it at the library and probably read it with a wrong frame of mind, trying to locate the bits that are "dirty", "dangerous", "restricted".

While parents should be aware what their kids do on line, or what books they read, it should be to protect them from a potential dangerous situation. The solution is old as psychology itself: communication. People need to talk about these things, not try to cover them up.

On the other hand, the Internet makes it very hard to forbid or prohibit things anymore. Everything is available, everything is possible to find, censorship becomes just a provocation. Ratings for movies are just an additional cost, it is not proven that labeling a movie as rated R will stop kids from watching it, illegal copying, borrowing, downloading or even stealing pose no obstacle, instead this rating mechanism encourages these behaviors.

So we should do our society a favor and instead of finding mechanisms to stop people from doing things, let's open up the communication channels as wide as possible.

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