Why should schools and public libraries censor internet sites and ban books unsuitable for children?
According to the ALA (the American Library Association), public librarians should NOT censor. If parents are interested in controlling their children’s reading, it is their own responsibility to supervise their borrowing. However, since taxpayers have to vote to fund the library, often libraries are forced to make tough decisions about the sort of books they buy to keep the community happy, sometimes at the expense of minority interest groups – an indirect form of censorship, I suppose. The US Government has continually tried to enact legislation to encourage censorship, although this has run into difficulty against constitutional rights. There is a good article on this at: http://www.crf-usa.org/bria/bria15_4.htm… There are a couple of good resources which explain this whole issue in more detail at: http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/basics/i
