Censor the Textbook: A True Story

This is a persuasive essay/true story post about censoring materials used in education. If you want to know about the people mentioned, they're Anney (she's nice), Oreo (he is obsessed with Oreo cookies), Ram (he's not very nice, usually), and V (she's super nice and almost like a sister to me).

We had a social studies test on Friday. Oreo, Ram, and I finished before Anney and V did. Ram, wanting to read ahead to get a good understanding of the concepts, opened his social studies textbook to a random page in the next unit (Rome). The page had a pic on it, and the picture had a person with... no clothes on. Then Oreo opened his textbook and there was a picture of a random guy with a six-pack. I opened mine and saw a picture of a woman dressed in an outfit that would have been dress-coded nowadays. V finished her test and crept over to Oreo's desk to see the pictures we found and evaluate how bad they were. She joined us in trying to find more, and we totally succeeded. (I won't mention what we found on this post, because I've already mentioned enough wrong stuff.) And we kept on looking through and finding pervertedness while Anney was still doing her test and trying not to listen to us. Anney finally finished and we told her about the pervertedness, showing her the pictures we found. She was all like, "Let's go tell the principal!" and Oreo, Ram, V, and I agreed. But at that exact moment, school was out (we have social studies as our last class). I didn't tell the principal because I had an orthodontist appointment immediately after school, and I don't know if Anney, Oreo, Ram, or V did.

After reading this true story, do you agree with me that teachers should think twice before choosing the textbooks to use? There are inappropriate images and concepts in our social studies textbooks, which we use every day, yet we can only read and watch G-rated movies and books in class! How is this fair to students? Also, the inappropriate pictures in textbooks might give some of the less mature students a notion that perverted concepts are good. Who knows what will happen to the kids who fall for this? The pictures might be authentic artwork from the period in time that the kids are learning about, but the least textbook authors can do is black out the inappropriate content and leave everything else as it was.

I believe that student textbooks should be censored and that inappropriate materials should be removed from them.

Thanks for reading this story/essay!