There’s no doubt many of you out there have heard of Babar, that lovable gray elephant who has graced the pages of countless children’s books for many years.

A Tennessee parent has also heard of that same elephant and recently asked his son’s school district to remove the books from its libraries.

The parent said Babar is too violent (his mother is killed when he is young), incestuous (he calls everyone “cousin” and later marries one of his “cousins”) and is a glutton (he’s rich).

Well, now we can see why someone would want to get the evil Babar. Perish the thought of our children being subjected to the rigors of reading an entire volume of the despicable Babar.

Obviously there are those in Tennessee and across the nation who promote the kind of ridiculous book banning and censorship evidenced by this example. Thankfully, the proposal to ban Babar failed, but other tomes haven’t fared quite as well.

Book banning in the schools is nothing new. For years, books like Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” and John Steinbeck’s “Of Mice and Men” have found their way into censorship because a few short-sighted, fanatical parents don’t like the existence of anything controversial in a school library.

Mind you, those classics weren’t being read to kindergarteners. They were banned from various junior high and high school libraries around the country.

The hysteria extends to today’s writers like Maya Angelou, whose book “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” was banned from several Maryland school districts for its depictions of rape and teenage pregnancy.

School districts have a right to select the proper school curriculum. However, that right does not allow the hypersensitivity of parents to force literature from library shelves.

Of course there are some limits to this. No one would want a first-grader to read a book about murder or a book containing photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe. Obviously that subject matter is too explicit and disturbing for a young child.

As students matriculate through the educational process, they are exposed to increasingly new and complex subjects and ideas.

Many of those ideas and subjects are controversial to one person or another, but most will expand the minds of their readers — something necessary in education.

Banning books does nothing more than wrap students in an ignorant cocoon. Yes, they will learn the three Rs.

However, they will learn nothing about the subject of life, which is undoubtedly the most important subject a school can teach.