How much should we censor a child's reading? On my office
bookshelves are various books on psychology and sex. Any child
is free to borrow them at any time. Yet I doubt if more than one
or two have ever shown any interest in them. Not one boy or
girl has ever asked for Lady Chatterley's Lover, or Ulysses, or
Krafft-Ebing, and only one or two seniors have borrowed the
Encyclopedia of Sex Knowledge.

One time, however, a new pupil, a girl of fourteen, took A
Young Girl's Diary from my bookshelf. I saw her sit and snig-
ger over it. Six months later, she read it a second time and told
me that it was rather dull. What had been spicy reading to igno-
rance had become commonplace reading to knowledge. This
girl came to Summerhill with a dirty ignorance whispered in
classroom corners. Of course, I cleared her up about sex matters.
Prohibition always makes children read books on the sly.

In our young days we had our reading censored, so that our
great ambition was to get hold of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, or
Rabelais, or translations of French yellowbacks. In other words,
censorship was used as a criterion for selecting the most interest-
ing books.

Censorship is feeble inasmuch as it does not protect anyone.
Take James Joyce book Ulysses, once forbidden in England
and the United States, but then purchasable in Paris or Vienna.
It contains words that are usually described as obscene. A naive
reader would not understand the words; a sophisticated reader,
knowing them already, could not be corrupted. I remember a
school principal criticizing me because I introduced The Pris-
oner of Zenda into the school library. Surprised, I asked why.

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