#stratsburg

To Concerned Parents,

                Hello, my name is Rebekah, but you can call me becki, and I am a sixteen year old high school student, I am also homeschooled.  I am writing this letter to address the proposed cleanse of the curriculum for your “Young Adult Literature” elective.  Being homeschooled gives me, I think, a unique perspective on this particular issue.  My parents are intelligent people, protective of me to the degree that when the private school I had been attending closed and the public school in our particular area was less than acceptable they made the decision for my mom to stay home and teach me and both of  my brothers, a huge sacrifice on her part.  This however gives my parents the ability to dictate literally every single part of my curriculum, but I also have a very good communication route to contact my “school board” and request books or curriculum changes.  So when I became interested in adding John Green’s “Looking for Alaska” to my reading list two year ago I simply went to my parents and asked, they said no.  They had looked at a few pages in the book, randomly opening it and had seen some things that they didn’t approve of so they told me I couldn’t read the book until they had as it was not age appropriate.  My parents have done this with most of the questionable books on my proposed reading list; they order it from the library and read it in its entirety and then make an executive decision as to whether or not I should be allowed to read it.

                Last year everything changed, last year I started high school, last year I found out about John Green’s “The Fault in Our Stars”, and last year my parents told me that they trust me. I had been asking my parents about a TV show that I wanted to watch but wasn’t sure if it was appropriate for me, my mom approached me to say the she trusted my discretion.  In other words, she not only trusted me to choose if the show was alright to watch, she trusted that if I did decide to watch it I would be able to watch it with perspective.  She was telling me that I was old enough to read or watch something and draw my own conclusions, that even if it was inappropriate I could look at it thoughtfully and critically. This trust in me is one of the reasons I decided to read “The Fault in Our Stars” this year.  I read it as a teen trying to understand that other teens think just like I do despite what they go through, that people are complex emotional beings with ‘thoughts that cannot be fathomed into constellations’. “The Fault in Our Stars” is not about two teens who are about to die and therefore have sex. I believe, despite what the author may have intended, that the characters having sex was a bad decision on the characters parts.

                In the petition statement you said “Teens have very impressionable minds and having them read books which impress images of profanity, pornography and illegal acts only creates impressions which degrade their minds—and in some cases may lead to them committing such acts themselves.”  While I believe that teens have impressionable minds, I also think that a teenagers parents, whether said teen admits it or not, are the foremost influence in their lives.  You as parents have taught your children to have a worldview reflective of your own; your teens are growing up.  My older brother began college this year and I have watched as out from under my parents guidance he has kept his scholarship, kept his high GPA, and resisted the temptation to slack off or drink away his time. Perhaps, instead of censoring the negative influences that your children will inevitably be faced with later in life, you should sit down with your teen and tell them why you don’t approve of these books, impress upon them the need to look at everything in life with discretion and wisdom, and trust them.

Thank You