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The question of whether or not we need ratings for books to protect kids from adult content is no simple one. I can remember the time when I was in school reading some of these books...

Back in 1990, I was graduating from a magnet high school in a mid sized U.S. city. It was a prestigious school at the time having recently garnered honors as one of the top five public schools in the country. With an ACT score of 26 considered just average at this school, many of these students were destined for success. One kid who lived in the neighborhood next to mine was in the graduating class ahead of me and has just recently become a state governor.

But even though I was attending this excellent school, intellectual freedom and the adventures of high school took their toll on me. In my ninth grade year, I can remember feeling pretty conservative about life. I had made a conscious effort to maintain a safe distance from fellow school mates who were getting "into things". But over the next couple of years, any natural conservative tendencies that I felt would soon give way to the 'exploration' mindset that seems so pervasive in our nation's public schools.

In my English classes at the school, we not only had access to all the 'good books', the ones that were often banned in other schools throughout the country, but we were assigned these books and expected to read them. Catcher in the Rye, 1984, Slaughterhouse-Five, Fahrenheit 451, Huckleberry Finn, the Fountainhead, we had to read them all. Looking back, I don't recall these books as being the epitome of evil or anything, but to my young impressionable mind, well, they made an impression.

Catcher in the Rye probably had the most influence on me. I can remember reading about Holden Caulfield, how he got kicked out of prep school, how he went to visit his former English teacher, how he had to room with the 'Ackley Kid', how he kept on going on and on telling people about the operation on his 'clavichord', and especially his repeated us of the word "gd". As a young man whose parents would not have been amused had that word passed from my lips, I found it incredibly amusing and exhilarating that I was able to read this book in which Holden got to say it every other word.

But as "cool" as all of this seemed to be, I would have to say in retrospect that this book altered my natural conservative nature and contributed to a certain aloofness and cynicism that I admired in Holden Caulfield's character, in some ways I wanted to

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