As soon as you say, “Don’t do this” or “Don’t do that,” pretty soon your kid is up on the roof smoking a cigarette they stole out of your backpack. That’s just the way kids are. The more books that you ban, the more things you tell the child to sneak around looking for. Whereas if, for example, the book wasn’t banned, but it was assigned, that’s when the child might not read it. Children need to read a whole lot of different points of view to understand their own point of view. And as they read all those other points of view, their own ideas about things form themselves.
Jane Smiley
