By Laura Sessions Stepp
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 12, 2001; Page C10

When Pat Scales was a youngster growing up in a tiny Alabama town, there was no young adult fiction to speak of. She didn't read Judy Blume or Mildred Taylor. She read John Steinbeck and Mark Twain -- the same authors her father was reading.

Books were the primary way that she and her dad, a scientist, communicated. It never occurred to either of them that she shouldn't be reading adult themes. Today, as a 57-year-old high school librarian, she wonders why anyone thinks adolescents shouldn't be able to enjoy Steinbeck and Blume, Twain and Taylor.

Beginning in middle school, children should be free to read what they choose and free to reject books they don't understand or don't like, she says. Parents, teachers and librarians can and should help them in their search, but the ultimate decision should be theirs.

Scales, recently named one of the five most influential 20th-century librarians in South Carolina, makes this argument in "Teaching Banned Books" (American Library Association, $28), a new book designed to show adults how they can guide young students through novels that have been banned for reasons including foul language, overt sex and racial rhetoric. "I don't believe every book is for every child," she said in a telephone interview. "But these are books that shouldn't be missed."

Scales's book summarizes 12 of her favorite young adult novels -- novels she taught during 26 years as a middle school librarian in Greenville, S.C. She takes note of passages that some readers have found offensive and offers questions designed to encourage young readers to think critically about those sections and the work in general. Taylor's "Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry," for example, an account of one black family's attempt to keep its land during the Depression, has been challenged by some critics as being biased against whites. "Discuss the difference between racial bias and racial discrimination," she suggests.

The library association hopes Scales's down-to-earth guide will bolster other librarians and teachers who increasingly are under political pressure to remove certain books from their shelves and reading lists. Such challenges jumped by one third between 1999 and 2000, to 646, according to the library association. Most of them were unsuccessful.

In Fairfax County schools, for instance, a group called Parents Against Bad Books in Schools said it was influential in having 15 novels on last year's summer reading list for county teenagers removed from this year's list. Works by Isabel Allende, Alice Walker and David Guterson are among those dropped. School authorities said that although the list was revised, the parents group played no role.

Last month, however, the parents group did persuade the school board to restrict "The Pillars of the Earth," a historical novel by Ken Follett, to grades 10 and up.

Scales, who will be speaking about intellectual freedom at George Mason University in August, catalogues such censorship efforts with the fervor of a general arming for battle. "The enemy is organized groups of people, from the right and the left, who are determined to gain power over what students read, learn, and view," she writes in her first chapter, "Studying the First Amendment." "Library boards are under pressure to place ratings on books and to install Internet filters. . . . Students' names are tagged, at parental request, for restricted use of certain library materials. . . . Frightened librarians are limiting young students to the "easy" books section and requiring older students to bring written parental permission to read [certain books]."

In her view, censors are wrong to blame books for social trends of which they disapprove. Do those who protested the Follett book think reading about sex in the Middle Ages encourages children to attempt to copy what they've read? Scales doesn't.

Books teach kids about characters and characters' lives, she said. Kids read contemporary fiction as much to understand what is going on with their friends as with themselves. Teachers and parents should use books such as Follett's to discuss with kids the trends the adults find disturbing. "The danger is not in reading about these issues," she says. "The danger is in not talking about them."

But talking about tough issues is precisely what the protesters don't want to encourage. "The problem is obvious," Scales writes. "Censors want to control the minds of the young. Students who read learn to think. Thinkers learn to see. Those who see often question. And young people who question threaten the 'blind' and the 'nonthinkers.' "

Scales believes librarians can do much more than they have done to build the public's confidence in books and in the children who read them. At Greenville Middle School, she saw it as her job to encourage the 1,100 students to read and question. Each morning before school started, she invited sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders to listen to her read from a novel. She read 10 novels a year, drawing as many as 75 or 80 kids at a session.

She made it her business to know each student's reading and maturity levels and steered children toward books she thought they were ready for. "I would go to the stacks with kids and help them select books," she recalled. "If I thought a sixth-grader was going to choose something inappropriate, I would say, 'That is a great book, but knowing you, I know a book you'd like better.' They'd always take it."

She became a champion of adolescents' intellectual potential and innate good sense. Children know that they must read and think about the ideas of others in order to form their own ideas, she says, and that in order to understand history they must become familiar with all sides of history. They will reject books they're not ready for, she said, unless they're told not to read those books. Then they'll do whatever it takes to acquire them, just as earlier generations have done.

Scales said she never was challenged about the books she stocked in her library and she thinks she knows why. The parents trusted her as much as the children did.

She ran a parent literature program at the school called "Communicate Through Literature." Parents would read books suggested by their children; children and parents would talk about the books both had read. Scales then would lead a discussion with moms and dads about what they had learned about their kids through their particular book.

The program had benefits she couldn't have predicted. Parents discussed the different books they were reading and came to understand that while one parent might not want her daughter to read a certain book, another parent might insist on it. Participants began to understand that adolescents of any one age vary widely in maturity, background and need.

"While a parent does have a right to become involved in what their kids read, he or she doesn't have a right to say what other kids can read," said Scales, now director of library services at the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities.