Everyone's seen that picture of Ruby Bridges - you know the one I mean. Everyone's seen that picture of a six year old in her little school dress, flanked by police, while adults scream and jeer at her.
Again, she was six - the same age as most first graders. She lived this chapter in history. Yet there are plenty of people out there who want to prevent six-year-olds from learning about the challenges other kids faced. They don't want their kids to read about "troubling" things. They don't want their kids to read about Ruby's actual struggle (just label her the first Black child to attend an integrated school in her district and move on). They don't want their kids to read about George Takei starting school in a makeshift classroom under the bleachers in a Japanese internment camp.
And, granted, George Takei's memoir They Called Us Enemy is not aimed at six-year-olds... but it is a relatively tame graphic novel about his childhood in an internment camp and how it affected him as he grew up. It's not NOT intended for a young audience.
"But they're too young to hear about that!"
Well, when is a child old enough to learn about six-year-olds experiencing racism? Are teenagers old enough to learn about what happened to high-school aged Anne Frank*? Are pre-teens old enough to learn about their own bodies, and what untrustworthy adults might ask them to do with those bodies, before it's too late to prevent assault, STDs, or pregnancy? Is little Susie too young to learn than her classmate Jimmy has two daddies? Do we just never talk about these things at all, stick our fingers in our ears and our heads in the sand and just pretend that our experience is the only one that matters?
*And let's be, well, frank - The Diary of a Young Girl is extremely tame when it comes to actually teaching about the horrors of the Holocaust.
Take a look at the list of banned books the last few years, and the list of frequently challenged books and the reasons why. A large portion of them are challenged for, among other reasons, being "unsuited to age group." This reason is a broad umbrella term used for everything from literature taught in 11th and 12th grade Advanced Placement literature classes, to picture books about guinea pigs and penguins.
Just let kids read. Be prepared to talk to them. Be prepared to guide them. But let them read. Let them learn. And just maybe we'll raise a generation of kind and empathetic human beings.
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