Censorship

Do people follow the guidelines of critical thinking when they censor or ban books?

Heinrich Heine, a famous German Jewish writer, had once said "Where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people."

The American Library Association has developed an Intellectual Freedom Manual to teach librarians how to address the freedom to think through collection development and reference services. Public and school librarians are often faced with requests to remove books from the collection, for various reasons. Sometimes the patrons win. Here are two recent examples:

Court Declares Vamos a Cuba OK to Be Removed from School Library Shelves
(Reason? The book is a positive depiction of life in Cuba, from a child's perspective.)

Teacher Wants to Expel Huck Finn
(His reason? "We have a black president now, a really articulate guy, yet all of the books we have students read in class show blacks as uneducated and unarticulate.")