by Kristen Borrelli

Created on: April 13, 2008

Schools are meant to teach children the fundamentals of academics and have the flourish as young people getting ready to spread their wings in an adult world. However, this does not mean that they should be able to choose books with adult themes or subjects for the children (and yes they are children) to read. Being a holder of a Bachelor's degree in English and seeing some of the books on my twelve year-old sister's reading list, I can tell you that there are some that are not appropriate for the minds of the young and impressionable. Who wants their child reading about sex, adultery, incest or pedophilia? For instance, Lolita. I saw my sister going through my old college books and she came across Nabokov's awful but at the same time intriguing tale of an older man infatuated with a little girl and the escapades they had together. I immediately took it away and removed all of the other "questionable" books from the house. Young kids are very interested in adult subjects, they want to act older, look older, and attract the opposite sex. That is fine to an extent; they still should have a fairytale outlook on life. Romance should be wonderful, sex should be something between a husband and wife, love should be pure, but if we start allowing adult-oriented books into the school system we are simply stripping the wondrous innocence of a child away, bringing them too quickly into "real-life." Yes, I know that they will eventually know about all of these things, but why tell them at school through books that most people didn't read until they were in college? You may think that they should know these things so they are better prepared but why should the school system decide when it's time for our children to learn about these things? Shouldn't it be up to the parents? In this day and age it seems that children are not children anymore. They speak openly about homosexuality, experiment with drugs and sex, and are exposed to some horrendous things all on the school bus ride home. Keep it out of the classroom and let children be children for the short amount of time they can. Why do they need to learn of the harsh reality of what goes on behind some closed doors?

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