Dark times

There was an interesting article in the Seattle Times (via the Tri-City Herald) a few days ago about a potential censorship case in the Richland School District. A 10th grade Honors language-arts class was offering Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a novel about a small boy dealing with the death of his father in the 9/11 attacks, as one of their supplementary (not required) readings. The book contains "profanity, sex, and descriptions of violence", and certain parents felt the school district had done an inadequate job of informing them of the book's subject matter. They are requesting some kind of system (flagging, a rating system, whatever) to warn parents about potentially objectionable content.

The parents' complaint was made with civility and reason, but as far as I'm concerned that just makes it scarier. When we start flagging books for content, we are setting ourselves up for one-size-fits-all censorship. What happens next? Do we flag school libraries? Only let kids check out books with a parent-approved rating? These kind of questions freak me out--if you're worried about something your kid is reading, read it yourself and discuss it with them. Hell, feel free to forbid them to read the book. But don't ask the school district to make systematic changes that do your work for you.