Intellectual Freedom: Banning the Dictionary

So one of my online friends turned me on to this article about the Menifee School District in California which has pulled dictionaries from the shelves due to a parental complaint about the definition of the phrase "oral sex" claiming it was too explicit and was not age appropriate.

For starters, here is the definition from Miriam Webster Online:
Main Entry: oral sex
Function: noun
Date: 1973
: oral stimulation of the genitals : cunnilingus, fellatio

Yup, that's about right. I'm not sure how much more of a dry, clinical explanation of this phrase this parent wants, but it seems pretty spot on to me.

So here's my beef.... beefs with this whole thing. No one parent gets to decide what is appropriate for all students, ESPECIALLY when we are talking about an important reference material like the dictionary. If she wants to keep her child ignorant that things like oral-genital contact might exist, that's her responsibility, not the school district's. The job of the school district is to promote learning and the spread of information. I even agree that schools should try to prevent access to pornography and explicit sexual content, which this definition is not.

Also, if parents would just give their kids good, age appropriate information about sex this wouldn't be an issue. I, for one, remember looking up "dirty" words in the dictionary just because I wanted to know what they were. The knowledge didn't make me sexually active at a young age and won't for other kids.

So, I encourage people to contact the Menifee School District and let them know that this kind of censorship is just plain silly. This parent is setting too broad of a definition on what isn't age appropriate, which will have a detrimental effect on the quality of education in this district.