Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Illegal library?

Today I was reading the latest post from the Annoyed Librarian on LibraryJournal.com titled "Banned Books in Fake Locker". The AL discussed a question and answer set posted on Yahoo Answers about a high school student at a strict catholic school setting up a library in an empty locker. In this 'library' the student checks out books that appeared on a banned list for that specific school to other students. The basis for his question is whether or not he could get in trouble for running this type of operation. Now when I first linked to this Q&A and read through I thought, how awesome! I found it great that a student would be interested in reading such classic literary works and sharing them with his peers. Then I read through what the AL thought. Often not the most positive blog to read through, the AL said there was no way that this is real and basically we are all idiots for thinking it could be!
Now, on one hand I understand how this could seem impossible. Most people can't image an average high school student starting up something like this and encouraging the reading of books that we were actually forced to read in many of our English classes. However, as crazy as this story sounds, I like to believe it could be true! Finding a student who is dedicated to the intellectual freedom of these types of items is a wonderful thing! While many of the answers tell this student that he could definitely get in trouble for breaking school policy in this way, they commend his motive and offer him advice.

While I guess we many never know if this story is 100% true it is definitely a neat thing to think about a high school student doing!

2 comments:

  1. Jill,
    this is totally and completely cool for a high school student - or any student - to do. I like to believe it's true as well...and that there are Marcus' from Little Brother out there ready to challenge the system and push the boundaries of intellectual freedom and expression. Nice article and thanks for sharing this post!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jill, I already commented about this on Mary Beth's blog, but all signs point to it being a hoax: http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/8mmnq/yahoo_answers_wins_for_once/

    ReplyDelete