I recently came across this post, http://fishingboatproceeds.tumblr.com/post/79459303763/paper-towns-and-looking-for-alaska-challenged describing how John Green’s novels, Paper Towns and Looking For Alaska are being challenged for their capacity to cause moral erosion in the minds of young readers opting to take a Young Adult literature class in Strasburg, Colorado. I was inspired, by the great John Green himself to write this letter to the School Board of Strasburg:
To the School Board:
Hello, first of all, I’d like to thank you for taking the time to read this letter as I understand as a school board you have plenty of responsibilities on your plate. I’ve never directly written to a school board, but I have had the opportunity to work with one. I served as Chair of the Pahrump Youth Advisory Board to the Town of Pahrump and as a board, my fellow members and I presented a white paper titled Students Perspectives on Education to the Nye County School District Board of Trustees. By doing so, we were able to communicate some of the concerns students of Pahrump Valley High School share to the board. One of the topics was resources.
This low income community that I dearly call home does not have the resources for many elective options. Pahrump Valley High School provides one foreign language option to it’s students. The fact that there is an English teacher in Strasburg, Colorado who has the resources and necessary funding to teach an elective in Young Adult literature is the most uplifting news I’ve heard about education in quite a while. If such a course was available at my school, I’d sign up in a heartbeat. While on facebook, I noticed one of my favorite authors, John Green, had made a post about two of his books being banned from the curriculum of this particular elective class. I was shocked. Like many others, John Green changed the way I read and made revisions to the reason why I read. Before, I read to learn about things I would not normally have the chance to experience. John Green writes novels about young adults for young adults. After reading Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns, I realized that I had been going about reading all wrong. Now, I read to learn about things I would not normally have the chance to experience and apply the knowledge I gain to real life situations which, to my honest surprise, I have encountered in my teenage years. It has been a careful agent in developing my decision making skills.
Looking for Alaska is one of the most heartfelt novels I have ever read. To ban this book would be to take away a great reading experience from students with passions for reading. Young readers are a dying breed. In an age where the media is desensitizing the youth, books like Looking for Alaska and Paper Towns are necessities to the youth. John Green’s books are emotionally charged and genuine. They cause readers to contemplate and form ideas that are purely their own. They are essential in the shaping of young minds. Banning books, particularly Green’s, seems archaic and I would be severely disappointed if our society, that has come so far in the means of accepting others, were to revert to the judgmental world we used to live in. Teens need an outlet for emotional connection and personally, I have found great solace in John Green’s words. The basic fact is this: John Green writes to help young adults.
I have identified with John Green’s character, the Colonel, so strongly that even some of my friends have begun addressing me as the Colonel. While we as teens may not be exact replicas of his characters, we are certainly able to recognizes the similarities between ourselves and is characters. We find bits of his creations in ourselves and suddenly, we don’t feel so alone, so subject to ostracism. Looking For Alaska and Paper Towns helped me face realities in safe ways. I owe John Green for helping me stay on the right path towards success and a self-determined seventeen years of happiness. Had I not picked up reading again, I would not be in my AP Literature & Composition class or have written for my local newspaper for six months. Reading is just the beginning to a whole world of opportunities. It makes me sad to think that others don’t know the supreme pleasure that reading a John Green book can give a person. I quote Looking for Alaska when I say, “It always shocked me when I realized that I wasn’t the only person in the world who thought and felt such strange and awful things.” I am not alone and there are ways to work through problems in a healthy manner with others who struggle.
It pains me to think that parents and adults would like to ban these books in order to protect their children and youth in their community. Green’s work is one of the safest environments to really question and discover what being a teenager is really about – making the right mistakes. We can’t stop our youth from making mistakes, but we can protect them from a life of naïveté. I believe this is exactly what John Green aims to do when he writes. Quite frankly, to say that John Green’s work is damage-inducing because it would provoke teens to engage in similar activities or act on the thought-provoking messages they convey seems downright absurd. Green is an advocate for individualism and community simultaneously. It’s possible to belong to a group and to oneself; this is one of the greatest freedoms teens can discover.Please don’t ban John Green novels. Please trust in the good intentions of Strasburg’s teacher and support said teacher by allowing them to teach lessons rather than withold useful, life-saving information. Censorship is harmful and does not help anyone. Thank you for reading this letter from a passionate advocate of teen reading.
Kind regards and deepest hopes,
Andy Sposato
Pahrump Valley High School Senior
March 13, 2014
You can email your letters of disencouragement to this address: StrasburgYALiteratureCourse@gmail.com. Please use this address,
“To the School Board:”
You know what I think? 
Reblogged this on Sydney reads. Andy reads. .