Aaron Heath Dr. Harris English 102 Research paper Censorship The idea of censorship in our country is the idea that certain people are restricted from doing certain things because of safety or moral value. Is censorship a good idea? Or is it taking away our freedom to do what we want to do. Censorship is a good thing that our sociaty has. But there are some people out there in our sociaty that think censorship takes away our freedoms to do what we want to do. The first example of the way we use censorship in our sociaty are the movie ratings.
The movies today are rated G, PG, PG-13, and R. A rated G movie would not have scenes where someone is blowing someone’s head off with a shotgun and blood and guts spilling everywhere. The reason for this is that some younger children may get scared if they see violence like that. It would not be the best thing for a young child to be thinking about stuff like that. If children are prone to seeing violence like that at a young age, they may cause themselves or someone else serious damage in the future (Goldberg 25).
Children under a certain age probably should not watch TV shows or movies that have graphic violence in them until they understand about violence and how dangerous certain things are in the world today.
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Some children out there may think every thing they watch is true and fun to do. If a child watches a lot of violence, one day they might think it would be cool to go out and shoot someone for the fun of it. There are some children out there who are censored all the time on what they watch or do. Some of these children may not know how the real word works. They may think that nothing could ever happen to them and they will be safe all the time.
Children should be censored on some things, but they also need to be told on how the real world is and not shelter them from that. For example, September 11 we experienced the most violent, tragic acts in American history. Children should not be sheltered by not knowing what goes on in the world (Cagle 20).
There are some people out there who think that no matter how old people are that they have the right to watch whatever they want to. It doesn’t matter if they are thirty or ten, some people believe that anyone has a right to make a choice on what they want to watch.
Some people don’t mind their children watching R rated movies because they think that it won’t them. Some people think that if their child is mature enough that they can watch what they want to. Do parents have a right to tell their children what to watch and what not to watch (Haupt man 43)? Until that child grows up and goes out on his / her own parents have the right to raise them however they want to. Another form of censorship is what the government censors on us as a nation. For example, the parental advisory on tapes and CD’s that are sold. The government decided in court that any album with lyrics that are bad such as violence, sex, and drug use will have a parental advisory placed on the cover of the album to warn kids that what they are buying is basically trash.
Was this the right thing to do? Does the government have the right to tell us what is good to listen to and what isn’t good to listen to? A lot of artists that made these albums were outraged because they said that it was taking away their freedom of speech and it would hurt their bank accounts because less people would buy their albums. Is censorship losing your freedom of speech (Foster 80)? This could not be losing your freedom of speech because the song artists still get to write whatever songs they want to write. The parental advisory is on the albums for a reason. It is there to warn children, not prohibit them from the music they want to listen to. Censorship is also used in our school systems today.
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Children are being censored on what they are being taught, what they read. What they watch, and, in now in days, what they do on the computer in the classroom. Teachers are also being censored on what they teach or what they show their students. A teacher that would show a third grade class Saving private Ryan would probably be in big trouble.
I don’t think that teachers would also encourage their students to read playboy magazines either. That is a form of censorship. There was a problem at one elementary school where a student borrowed a book from the school library. The book was a scary stories book. The child had a problem with nightmares and when he read it the book scared him and upset the child.
The mather of the child was mad at the school because they did not warn him. Should this tell us to take scary books out of our school system (Manly 196)? Books like that should not be taken out of the classroom, but teachers should censor students on what they are reading. Some teachers like to show their students videos for educational purposes. Teachers are censored on what kind of videos they can show. Computers are getting to be very popular in the classroom. Some first graders know more about computers than adults do.
Teachers censor their students by making sure the students stay off bad sites or sites that are not educational. More and more teachers are going to computers for their classroom. Censorship in our country mainly points to children. The reason we have a rating system, parental advisories, and censoring children in the classroom is to make them better and smarter in the long run. A lot of people may not like the idea of censorship at all.
Others think that it is a necessity for moral values to be preserved in the great country we live in today.
