[brudgers]

>"It’s a tiny bit violent"

A child kills several other children barehanded.

Then goes on to stamp out an entire intelligent life form - Card's view on this is pretty apparent in the first two sequals; Speaker for the Dead and Xenocide.

It's always surprising how non-analytical we can be when it comes to violence - an entire planet is destroyed and millions of people screams are heard across the galaxy in A New Hope. Yet, the movie so ingrained in children's culture, it was an uphill battle to prevent my son from watching it when he was three [I felt like it was a victory that he didn't see it until he was five].

That said, Ender's Game is appropriate reading for 14 year olds, and the idea of it as pornographic is asinine. Same could be said of Bloom's Forever of my youth.

[chernevik]

It's a thoughtful book and such its "violence" can't be quantified onto a simple scale. The personal confrontations are calculated and desperate, they serve the dramatic purpose of establishing the seriousness of the stakes. They also show Ender's resourcefulness, attention to the long haul even under pressure, and savagery when cornered. Ender's choices in the space war are entirely rational, which quickly raises the question whether the morality of the xenocide lies with Ender or those who framed the problem.

All of which sets up "Speak for the Dead", one of the best sci-fi books I know.

Anyone rejecting violence qua violence should probably stay away, but they'll be missing a pretty important reflection on its causes and consequences, and the possibility of redemption.

The books after "Speaker" suck.

[ajross]

Then goes on to stamp out an entire intelligent life form

... which happens "off-camera" (sort of: the event is presented as a video game fiction with no visible non-mechanical participants), and is presented quite clearly as a moral lesson in the text. Arguing for censorship on this basis would rule out things like history lessons about real wars too, wouldn't it? You don't want to teach middle schoolers that war exists?

[ianferrel]

>A child kills several other children barehanded. >Then goes on to stamp out an entire intelligent life form

Yes. But the murders are not described in great detail or at great length, and all are in self-defence. A relatively small portion of the book deals with overtly violent acts, Ender feels great remorse, and the tone is not one of glorifying violence.

I think it's still reasonable to say the book is "a tiny bit violent".

[koof]

What about the whole "Ender commits mass genocide" part?

The book's apologetic tone about his violence doesn't make it any better - I would even argue that it makes it worse, as it waters down to "extreme violence is okay if you don't feel good about it".

[ianferrel]

> What about the whole "Ender commits mass genocide" part?

I claim there's a difference between a violent act, and a violent work of literature about that act.

The book spends only a paragraph or two on the actual genocide. No graphic descriptions are portrayed.

If I write, "Hitler and the Nazis killed millions of people in WWII", does that make this post violent? I'd argue that it does not. It's a fairly dry and matter-of-fact description of very violent acts. The post is not violent.

On the other hand, I could write a particularly violent description of a minor fight that left both people alive, but would be far more gruesome and objectionable. There's not a direct relationship between a body count and the violence of a literary work about it.

[nooneelse]

Self-defense ends when the immediate threat is incapacitated. Ender fights on past that point. The umbrella of "self-defence" does not cover all that he does.

[JoeAltmaier]

That's kind of the point in the book - they chose Ender because he would finish every fight definitively, conclusively and not waffle. Its actually one of the themes.

For a weak, picked-on child it was Ender's only defense in a violent world (from a child's point of view). He could not survive a truce that was then violated by the opponent. It would only give them the opportunity to surprise him later. He had to win on the 1st encounter.

The interstellar conflict was similar - the enemy attacked first, had a superior war machine and with time could overwhelm humanity.

Anyway, the point of books like this is to explore themes like that. They don't dictate a viewpoint to the reader, they provoke discussion and enable insights,if properly introduced to the juvenile reader.

[wmf]

You know what they say: killing one person is murder but wiping out an entire planet is just politics.

[kstenerud]

TBH I don't even see the problem with a three year old seeing A New Hope (except that he might be too young to understand it and might get bored and turn it off). What damage are you hoping to prevent, exactly?

Exposure to new ideas is a GOOD thing. Actively preventing your children from knowing about something simply because you disagree with it is censorship in its worst form.

[Avenger42]

Parental censorship is widely accepted, and not even worth comparing to state-sanctioned censorship, which I would argue is "censorship in its worst form".

Every parent has a right and a responsibility to teach their children in a way that they see fit, and though the state can be called in for cases where their teachings are far outside the norm, to take away or limit these rights is to remove the parent from their role.

Of course you can disagree with how someone else raises their kids - aunts, uncles, and grandparents have been doing that since the dawn of time.

But, just off the top of my head:

- Very young children: Owen and Beru's bodies after the stormtroopers find them?

- Slightly older children: Torture of prisoners on the Death Star?

- Near-teens: A greedy scoundrel as a "hero" through much of the film?

I see plenty of reason to prevent children from seeing them until you feel they're "ready". I don't have children yet, so I don't know when that would be for mine.

[joshbuddy]

It really irks me that in these conversations, we don't talk about the rights of the children, instead, it's just seen as a sliding scale between the rights of the parents and the rights of the state.

Of course, all of this makes me think of Ogden Nash's poem "Don't Cry Darling, It's Blood Alright" ... two lines:

Innocent infants have no use for fables about rabbits or donkeys or tortoises or porpoises, What they want is something with plenty of well-mutilated corpoises.

(It's also crazy that I can't find a complete copy of a poem from 1935 online)

[timwiseman]

It depends on what you mean by right, its a very context dependent word. In one sense, rights are precisely the things which the government is not permitted to interfere with. So in that sense it really is about the ability of the state to interfere (or not) with the way a parent raises their child.

In the broader sense, it becomes somewhat hard to talk about because it might matter greatly much how old the child is. My 3 year old is simply not in an position to make many good decisions for herself, but my 6 year old gets a fair bit more freedom, and as they get older I will hand more of the reigns of their own lives to them happily.

It is also hard to talk about separately because in a sense a child's rights are what is left over after the state and the parent divide up their rights, any right absolutely given to the child is denied to one of those two entities. Should I have the ability to restrict what my 3 year old sees? I think most would agree that I should.

Should I have the ability to restrict what my 13 year old sees (when one of them reaches 13)? That is touchier, but I think most will answer, "Yes, but you should use it less and listen to their judgment more." I certainly think that even when my child turns 13 I will want to keep them away from materials that overtly objectify women and I will judge on a case by case basis if they are ready for horror films or not.

For what it's worth, I agree with your sentiment at the end that many parents overly coddle even older children. But I also respect that each parent has the privelege and duty of making those decisions for themselves and their children until those children cease to be children.

[timwiseman]

I did watch A New Hope with my three year old, but the point is I decided that it was appropriate for my daughter and watched it with her so that I could explain anything she asked about and cut it off if it turned out more violent then I remembered.

I would not force the children of other parents to watch it, and I would be outraged if some government body said I couldn't show it to my three year old.

[hef19898]

I watched all three original Star Wars movies with my son (Episode IV through VI) when he was three and a half and honestly, I don't get the point why you shouldn't as long as you watch it with your kid. Since then he likes Jedis as much as he does knights in general. Aparently it didn't harm him.

As far as parental censorship goes every parent may decide for himself. but when parents are starting to try to get convictions of teachers for reading books in school they should rather for home teaching if that is legal. Books are knowledge and as long as they are read in the proper context they can only do good. I mean it#s not that Shakespeare or the other classics (e.g. Goethe's "Faust" or other works of him) are any less violent and / or pornographic. Personaly, I have problems with banning books or art, we have been at this place already too often I think.