What to do when a good series contains explicit language

A parent recently asked me why some of our books contain language that’s inappropriate for students to use in school. What should I tell her?

Explain to her that a library offers books about a variety of characters that may live in vastly different environments. Plus, just because you’ve included a title in your collection, doesn’t mean that you’re endorsing its language or ideas. It’s also not unusual to have students who will point out a novel’s “offensive language” and then alert their parents. If that happens, turn the experience into a teachable moment by showing the student how to do a thorough literary analysis: What is the essential conflict? Who is the main character? How does the author use language to define that character? Appealing to a student’s intellect will often diffuse a potential problem with a parent. Now is also a good time for you to become reacquainted with your school’s collection-development policy. Make sure it includes a statement about controversial books and materials.

My eighth graders love books like K. L. Going’s Fat Kid Rules the World. Although the novel’s language is sometimes explicit, it seems to always fit the story. Since there’s such a big difference between sixth graders’ and eighth graders’ maturity levels, how do I determine which books to buy for our middle school library?

Fat Kid Rules the World (Putnam, 2003) is an excellent novel for eighth graders, and a number of reviewers have recommended it for middle school collections. Explicit language shouldn’t be a factor in determining whether to include a particular book in your collection—unless the story’s potentially offensive language is gratuitous. Novels should be selected on the basis of literary merit and their overall appeal to the intended audience. Since you feel the language in Fat Kid Rules the World is appropriate and your students are crazy about the book, I’d recommend including it in your collection. I seriously doubt that many sixth graders will be drawn to Going’s novel. My experience with middle schoolers is that most of them ultimately reject titles they’re not ready for.

By the way, all too often teachers and librarians require kids to finish reading books they don’t like. That’s a powerful set-up for reading failure, and may eventually lead to censorship problems. Allowing students to simply return books that don’t interest them may eliminate most of your worries about the age appropriateness of certain titles.

What’s the difference between banning a book and having one removed from a collection after it has been reevaluated?

When books are banned from a library’s collection, they’re removed without due process—and without sound reason. That’s one of the reasons why the American Library Association recommends that every school district create its own collection-development policy—one that includes selection criteria as well as procedures for dealing with formal book challenges. Most districts have reconsideration committees, made up of teachers, librarians, administrators, community members, and students. When its members evaluate a challenged title, they should carefully consider their school or district’s collection-development policy. That way, the reevaluation process will be as objective as possible. If a committee decides that a title isn’t appropriate, then it must be removed from a library’s shelves.

If our reconsideration committee decides that a book is unsuitable for our collection, should the title be removed from every library in the district?

Not necessarily. A reconsideration committee may decide that a book is unsuitable for an elementary school library, but appropriate for a middle or high school library. For example, Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Alice series has been challenged in school districts nationwide. Some committees have said that The Agony of Alice, the series’ first book, is fine for elementary school libraries, but subsequent books in the series (like Achingly Alice, Alice Alone, Simply Alice, and Including Alice), which follow the protagonist when she’s a lot older, are more appropriate for middle school libraries. Luckily for readers, and for libraries, those reconsideration committees didn’t ban the entire series—they offered a compromise. So everyone is a winner. By the way, Naylor has also written prequels that feature Alice as a young girl.