Having been an advanced reader myself (Little House in the Big Woods was my favorite book when I was six), I tend to bristle at what strikes me as censorship of kids' reading. Pull it behind the desk, maybe, but even that makes me twitch.

I don't know how to say this next thing without coming off like a privileged asshat, and maybe I am being one, but the problem with classic children's lit is that most of it contains disturbingly racist or sexist or classist imagery. The Secret Garden, for instance, is not at all just to the people of India, and A Little Princess is, IMHO, worse. Anne of Green Gables and most of LM Montgomery's work is very, very anti-French-Canadian and anti-Italian. Caddie Woodlawn contains racist portrayals of Native Americans. Little Women is deeply sexist in some troubling ways. Don't get me started on Peter Pan. And, of course, there's Huckleberry Finn, which is racist even while protesting some of that racism. That doesn't mean we should ignore it, but I'm also not convinced that removing all of the objectionable literature from the children's bookshelves is the way to go, either. Because while there are some wonderful modern texts that aren't as problematic, a lot of things are also being lost.

I think the struggle is that we have to find a way to accept and acknowledge our racist past (and present) without losing the things that we should preserve from that past, or allowing the racism to stand unchallenged. I'm not comfortable with just removing the ugliness and taking the beauty right with it, but I'm not sure what the solution is, either.