Why The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn should not be banned
             A 16-year-old young man watches Jerry Springer as the hostile Ku Klux Klan shout racial slurs at African-Americans in the audience. His mother walks in the room, snatches the remote control all tells him he is not to watch such shows; then, she changes the channel to CNN and watches a black farmer beat a white landowner over a land dispute in Africa. However, as much as the mother tries to cover her sons' eyes and ears, she cannot shelter her son from reality forever because no matter what channel-on television or in life-reality will blow the roof of the shelter that she continues to construct. Similarly, the board of education in California tries to shelter their students as they continue to ban the controversial novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. In his satire, Twain provides students with American History when he exposes the way his society treats African-Americans prior to the Civil War. Cosmopolitan California fears this exposure as the readers!
             learn about the brutal real world. Comparatively, students learn from Huck's trials and tribulations about their own true morals. Thus, Huck Finn should not be banned from a high school curriculum because it would deny a student: factual history of American society, harshness of our society, and the chance to develop morals and a conscience that is needed in society.
             Today, California tries to shelter their students from the novel because it severely exposes the way society treated African-Americans prior to the Civil War: as insignificant property rather than people. Huck's shameful father, Pap, talks about a well-dressed black professor, "There was a free nigger there, from Ohio...I says to the people, why ain't this nigger put up at auction and sold?" (Page 32-33) Pap's reference to a black man as a "nigger", the racist term for blacks, automatic...