Censorship in Schools

I fear that I tend to focus on the challenges to IF because I find them the most interesting and disturbing.  This week I came accross an incidence of the Merriam-Webster dictionary being banned in the fourth and fifth grades of a Southern California school district.  This disturbs me on many levels, particularly that the reason for the censorship was hat the dictionary contain a definition for "oral sex".  So now the school is not only censoring a very basic and ubiquitous resources, it is also doing so solely on the basis of a term that students might come across due to curiosity or accident.  In addition the comments of the parents and officials were disturbing in their willingness to censor a resource as useful as the dictionary.

The other reason that this story bothers me is that I didn't hear about it through the American media, it was picked up by the Guardian in the UK and then by Cory Doctorow.  I really think that our society would be less eager to censor ourselves if there was more coverage about the effects on education and access that censorship has.

Please read the original stories, I hope you laugh as much as I did to keep from crying.

Here is a link to the Cory Doctorow piece on BoingBoing.