I know that it takes no effort to agree with people who share your opinions, but I think Mr. Nelson is exactly right: we need to give high school graduates more time and opportunity to figure out what they want for the rest of their lives.

I only wish this article had been around when I finished high school.

Let’s travel back in time, shall we?

It’s the summer of 1996. I’m 19 years old, and I’ve just graduated from high school with honours (though, I had to redo my Ontario Academic Credit (OAC) year to get those honours). As I clear out my locker, I feel the same way I did when I was a small child: giddy with excitement at the prospect of endless summer days. Days that I could I spend reading, and swimming in my boyfriend’s parent’s backyard pool; all the carefree parties, BBQ’s, keggers, and general teenage mayhem that I could find and enjoy would be mine.

Then, a little part of my brain, the one struggling up through my childish (and, frankly, rather awesome) ideas, imposed with some sobering and unwelcome adult news: “You’re going to have to get a job. University isn’t free – and you don’t even know if you got into one yet.”

I walk home from school with a heavy backpack, and even heavier heart.

I’ve applied to several universities. My parents are pushing for McMaster University or, failing that, Mohawk College (where, so far as I can tell, they hope I will take a nursing degree). I try to think about where I might find work for the summer, I’m already working at the A&P, but I’ll need more hours if I’m going to pay tuition. The images of reading in the shade, are replaced by images of ringing in produce and flipping burgers. I’m not a child anymore, but I want to cry. I hate that even at 19 years old, the tears of a frustrated and unhappy child are still very close to the surface, so I push them down as I walk home.

I unpack my bag while having questions and statements fired at me: “Have you got a job lined up?”, “If you go to McMaster or Mohawk, you could live here – but you’ll have to pay rent.”, “What are you going to take in school?”, “I think you should try nursing, we need more nurses in Canada.” And on and on. Now I really want to cry and throw a temper tantrum too. I do neither.

But later that night, while walking down by the river, and throwing stones at the few panes of glass not yet broken in the old abandoned factories down there, I admit it to myself: I have no idea what I want to be when I grow up. No idea at all.

Sitting here, in 2012, I wish I could go back in time and give 19 year old me a hug. I wish I could tell her that things did work out – eventually. But at the time…well, I signed on at the University of Ottawa for an English Literature degree because the only thing I knew I had any talent for, was reading. I knew enough to know that a degree would be an important bit of paper to have later. That future employers might not care what my degree was in so long as I had one. To employers, a degree meant a certain amount of intelligence and seriousness: I could be considered capable of learning new things – like a Rhesus monkey in a lab – if I had one.

Four years later, I graduated. By then I’d read Milton, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Wordsworth, Tolkien, Whitman and pretty much every other author considered “important”. And while I’d found new literary things to fall in love with, I still had no idea how to apply that love to anything practical that might help me pay off my considerable student loans.

I worked in a series of jobs completely unrelated to my degree: deli counter clerk, SGML coder, low man on the totem pole at the British High Commission, cashier at HMV, shipper and receiver at SportMart, purveyor of deep fried foods at Fast Eddie’s and, for a time, I was an unemployed and unemployable 20-something.

So I could recite Romeo’s speech to Juliet, that fair sun, as she appeared on her balcony…big deal. I still had no idea what I wanted to be.

Knowing what I do now, I wish that we had had the “grownup” training that Mr. Nelson talks about. I think it would have benefit me greatly as a clueless 19 year old. I was unfocused, unfinished, young, scared, stupid, and woefully unprepared to be an adult. An internship, or a minimum wage position, at various places to get a feel for the nine-to-five world would have been just the thing for me. If nothing else, I would have learned what I didn’t want for myself. I believe that it is just as important to figure out what you don’t want as it is what you do want.

I’m 36 now, and only in the past few years have I discovered that the nine-to-five world is a place I can only visit for short periods of time. I also discovered that I despise working in retail. Imagine if I had figured that out sooner! What if I’d known that at age 21, or even at 25? How much more diligently might I have pursued the things I really love? How much harder would I have worked to make them into things I could do to support myself? How much happier would I have been? How much more confident, and secure in myself might I have been?

I think that sending a teenager, especially one with no focus, into debt for an education that may never do them any good once they sort themselves out as a person, is stupid and foolhardy. What are they gaining from an academic setting when they don’t even know what they want to learn? The only really useful things I learned in my four years were, how to be more tolerant of people I despised living with, how to split a phone bill, and how to shotgun a beer without barfing. OK, maybe I’m exaggerating a teeny bit (though not that much, really), but for the young people who have no idea what they want for themselves for the rest of their lives, university is a frightening moment.

Think of it like this: most people in my family live to be about 90. So, doesn’t it seem stupid to ask me, at 19 years old, to decide on a course of action that will shape the next 71 years of my life?

Thought of in that way, what’s another two years delay? It couldn’t hurt to explore all the options a little before taking on the debt and work of a degree – could it? Wouldn’t it create the opportunity to explore different career paths while managing to get some of that partying stuff out of the way on weekends? And wouldn’t getting that partying and uncertainty out of the way allow for greater focus on studying and learning? And wouldn’t greater focus mean money well spent – rather than wasted? I think it would.

I know that some work places have “bring your kid to work” days, so they can see what you do to earn the family’s bread and butter, but how useful are those? Imagine this: being dragged to work by a parent, at a stage in your life when you find them most intolerable and embarrassing (and that’s often a two-way street), so you can watch them (sort of) do something that’s not the tiniest bit interesting to you, while you count down the seconds before you can leave.

Not terribly useful. But, working with adults who haven’t seen you flip out on a sibling, or get grounded for lying, or seen the state of your bedroom at home? That’s a fresh slate within a structured environment. It’s easier to learn from, and really pay attention to, someone who hasn’t got any dirt on you. Someone you don’t both love and loathe. It’s a chance to learn what a professional relationship is.

In addition to “grownup training”, I’d also suggest mandatory, weekly psychiatric sessions for at least the second year. A time to work through the crap-storm of being a teenager, to sort out the stuff that’s screwing you up so it doesn’t screw you over. A chance to start really becoming who you are without having to wait until your late 30′s to get there. A place where you can speak your mind without some adult grounding you for “being mouthy” because your opinion differed from theirs. A place to learn how to function in the “real” world.

We need to reevaluate how and when we send teenagers out into the world, and to university or college. Are they really prepared? Do they really know what they want for themselves? Do they know anything about who they are? Are we doing them any favours by forcing them to choose a life so early?

The education system needs to take a good hard look at what they’re really offering high school graduates these days because, from my own experience, it’s seems to be mostly shackles of debt, doubt and unhappiness.

Protests like this never fail to sadden me. I cannot wrap my head around the idea of banning books for the supposed audacity of showing all facets of human life and behaviour – as though not reading about the bad parts of ourselves will somehow insulate us from those bad parts in real life. It astonishes me that we are so eager to ensure that kids, even the college bound ones, never encounter anything bad or upsetting.

I was thinking (and fuming) over this whole book banning nonsense last night as I was getting ready to sleep. I loaded up my toothbrush with some Colgate and grabbed the copy of Fahrenheit 451 ( amusingly, this Bradbury classic has a Lexile rating of 451), from the toilet tank, and opened it to a random page (though now, it hardly feels random at all).

This is what I read (Faber to Guy Montag):

“Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more ‘literary’ you are. That’s my definition anyway. Telling detail. Fresh detail. The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.

“So now do you see why books are hated and feared? They show the pores in the face of life. The comfortable people want only wax moon faces, poreless, hairless, expressionless…”

A little further on, Guy and Faber have the following exchange:

 “That’s the good part of dying; when you’ve nothing to lose, you run any risk you want.”
“There, you’ve said an interesting thing,” laughed Faber, “without having read it!”
“Are things like that in books? But it came off the top of my mind!”
“All the better. You didn’t fancy it up for me or anyone, even yourself.”

Faber hits it right on the head.

I think this is why people hate and fear books like Beloved, and all the other books they ban; these books show us as we really are. A good book doesn’t “fancy up” human behaviour or thought, it shows it, warts and all. As humans, we are capable of acts of great kindness, empathy, sympathy, bravery and outright heroism. But, we are also capable of being miserable, selfish, petty, murderous and cowardly – and these traits, these bad things about ourselves, about us a species, are mixed in with the good and finer things about us, and they cannot, and should not, be separated.

It is my belief that when we ban books, we are trying to cast out the worst parts of ourselves, and it’s a strange and wasted effort. I don’t suggest we fully embrace the darker aspects of ourselves by murdering and stealing with wild abandon, but I do think that when we try to deny these parts of our human nature via book banning, we’re just giving into another bad thing within ourselves: we’re refusing to learn anything about what it means to be human, we’re being stubborn and denying that the bad things depicted in books often come from the good lives we endeavour to lead.

Beloved, for example, is based on a true story, and I feel that whatever embellishments or liberties Tony Morrison might have made or taken with the actual story, her telling is a window into that first story, a piece of our history – actual, emotional, and spiritual – demanding to be seen and heard. I’ll never have to go through the things that Sethe goes through. I’ll never flee slavery with my children, and I’ll never be driven by despair and fear to kill my own child rather than see her taken back into slavery. But through Tony Morrison’s words, I can read about it. And because she writes so well, because her writing is so accessible, I can feel it – the anger and fear that might drive a mother to keep her child out of the hands of slave owners, anger toward the very foundations of thought that allowed slavery to happen in the first place, the way in which such a life and desperate act must alter the mind and degrade the soul; how open it leaves a person to being haunted – actually or mentally – by their deeds.

When I read the book for the first time in university, these were some of the thoughts I had: the character of Sethe was driven to terrible things by her circumstances. I believe that she is essentially a good person, an innocent person who was stripped of her rights and freedom as a human being, and in being denied the same rights as her “masters”, she gave her child the only freedom she could provide, in the only way she could think of in that moment. Do I agree with her actions? Hard to say from the safety and freedom of the 21st century. But whether I agree with her actions or not isn’t the only point of the story. Do I feel for her? Do I sympathize and empathize, and wish that I could reach through the pages and rescue her? Did the story make me think about the darker moments of our history? Did it make me examine my own beliefs, and poke around in the deep and dusty corners of myself rather than ignoring them? Yes. Very much so; and that is the point of reading any good book.

Books should not be banned on the basis of being difficult, or because of the awful and uncomfortable truths they may contain. Books are about us, about our lives, about our history, about how high we can rise, and how far we can fall. We need to read these things, we need the experience of being human in all circumstances – and especially those which we are unlikely to encounter. We need to think critically while we imagine ourselves in the character’s shoes. Books are a safe way to experience everything, they are a great way to learn about ourselves and others. The experiences we read about may even better prepare us for having to go through them ourselves.

We must all be allowed to read without restrictions so that we can develop emotionally, morally and creatively. These are worthy goals that reading can help us accomplish.

This is what books are for. This is why we cannot ban them.

My friend Amanda on the other hand is some sort of genius copywriter or grammar guru – her MSN messages are nearly 100% error free and entirely readable.

So, Amanda and I were chatting online one day when she noticed a typo – I had written “It was very entertainting.”

Her immediate response was that a typo that good needed a definition. I have provided one with an illustration:

Now that’s entertaintment!

(And thanks to Amanda and her eye for amusing, erroneous detail!)