It’s honestly terrifying that efforts to ban books and restrict what teachers can teach have made such a big comeback in the US. When I was in school, we always discussed banned books from the perspective of “we used to ban things that made people uncomfortable in the bad old days, but that could never happen in the 21st century”. Obviously that glossed over a lot of nuance, but it still shocks me as an adult seeing repression we discussed only from a historical perspective make its way back into the legislature.
Part of the purpose of education is exposing students to strange, uncomfortable, and even frightening ideas and giving them the tools to critically think about and even empathize with such ideas. They don’t have to even be “useful” ideas, since it’s important that students are given the tools to grow and become anything they want. It seems like a lot of groups around the country just want students to grow up to become drones working to prop up the economy. Anything that might make people question the nature of society or their role in it must be suppressed according to them.
I deeply oppose MAGA but the idea of winning through the take over of the cultural institution - school, universities, the media - has been theorized by Gramsci followers like Marcuse and Horkheimer.
In a lot of way, what we are witnessing in a counter movement swinging opposite to the heavy push for critical theory in the public sphere. Critical theory is not neutral. It is teleological in nature.
Schools have been a battle ground for decades I fear.
No. Not that you're making a good faith suggestion with your false dichotomy.
Just because someone doesn't want to keep their kid away from water doesn't mean they are okay with throwing them off a boat. There is a middle way, where you teach them to swim.
First, the article is sensationalist, the bill says nothing about banning books. It says the federal government will not fund any programs that promote "sexually oriented material".
We don’t teach creationism in school for the same reason we don’t teach the earth is flat: it’s a factually wrong, non-scientific idea. I don’t want someone telling my kids that the moon is made of cheese, nor do I want them lying that the earth is only 6,000 years old. That’s not censorship. That’s keeping science class scientific.
Why would there be an expectation that a public school would teach biblical nonsense? That's not censorship, it falls under a different high level principle of separating that from the state. It's also not censorship that schools don't teach pickpocketing. Stretching the word censorship doesn't make your case, it's transparently specious.
Equating both of these things is dangerous and wrong. It’s not as if these are the same things. Creationism is factually provably wrong by all standards of modern science. Pretending that the position of “we ban teaching things that are known to be wrong” and the position that “we ban teaching things that are by modern standards correct, but uncomfortable to our world view” is a large part of the problem.
> Equating both of these things is dangerous and wrong. It’s not as if these are the same things.
What's really going on is you seem so caught up in your own biases that you can't even see what you're doing.
> Creationism is factually provably wrong by all standards of modern science. Pretending that the position of “we ban teaching things that are known to be wrong”
Do you really think the reason teaching creationism in American public schools is banned is because it's "factually provably wrong by all standards of modern science?"
I kinda get the impression you may be someone who has a hard time distinguishing between your subjective view and objectivity. This controversy isn't in any way shape or form about "book bans," it's really about the political decision about whose subjective view will prevail in schools. But at least one side won't admit that, because there's power in gaslighting people and power in mischaracterizing things to hit certain buttons. Regardless of who wins, the same types of "curation" activities will occur in school libraries.
I struggle with the federal government's power over all this. Let the states and local jurisdictions decide. Put in guardrails so that those local jurisdictions don't become corrupted, but at the same time we should empower people to place their children in education systems that don't ultimately falter to who's empowered in the fed.
You may be okay with your children reading some books. That's great, and you should be able to find the right school districts for them, and I should be able to do the same to ensure my children don't read through explicit material without any form of parental oversight.
> I struggle with the federal government's power over all this.
From the TFA, the proposed bill "would modify the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 by prohibiting use of funds under the act". This is hardly a case of the federal government running roughshod over sates and local jurisdictions.
This is a wild exaggeration to call this a national book ban.
"Federal funding" is a misnomer. All of the funding comes from the taxpayers, and they're the same taxpayers. So when the federal government takes your money and then says "you can only have it back if you do X" they are not actually funding something, they are imposing a fine for not doing it.
If you want to paint an abstraction layer on top of it then all you have to do is make it symmetrical. The federal government is extracting money from the state's tax base that would otherwise be available to the state and conditioning its return on doing something, which is a financial penalty against the state for not doing it.
It's a fairly simple equation: What's the thing you'd have to do (or stop doing) in order to receive (or not pay) the money?
You can argue about whether imposing a financial disincentive on working is a good or bad policy but there isn't really any case to be made for it not being what they're doing.
My point was your initial premise is wrong: “All of the funding comes from the taxpayers, and they're the same taxpayers”. There’s plenty of instances where the federal government takes and redistributes tax dollars, from person to person, or state to state. Calling this particular instance a fine, but not every other instance, is wrong.
They're all fines. The person receiving something while paying nothing isn't the one being fined. They're doing the thing you have to do in order to not be fined. Indeed, that's where the financial penalties being paid by everyone else are going.
Go ahead and try to distinguish this from de jure financial penalties. If you get cited for speeding, that's definitely a fine, right? But the money then goes into the same general fund as other tax revenue. We're not even consistent in what we call this. The "tax" on cigarettes is clearly a penalty intended to deter usage, the proponents openly admit to it. The federal tax code is absolutely riddled with rules that cause you to pay a different amount based on whether you do or don't do something. The debates about which forms of taxation to use are fundamentally about which activities we want or don't want to be disincentivizing -- witness the people who openly express the intention to tax the rich specifically as a penalty for having too much money. Meanwhile the Georgists think we should use Land Value Tax instead of penalizing people for working.
The penalties for doing something look like you paying them when you do it. The penalties for not doing something look like them paying you when you do it. But because they don't actually have any of their own money, it's never actually them who is paying you, which means that everyone who "gets paid" (i.e. isn't penalized) is extracting that money from the penalties paid by everyone else. Who wouldn't have had to pay that both in the case where they did the thing required to avoid the penalty and where the government offered no such disincentive for not doing it by not collecting the money in taxes and other fines.
You're trying to make an exception out of the person who is actually paying $0 in all taxes, but to begin with that is extremely uncommon, e.g. good luck directly and indirectly avoiding property tax if you live indoors, or avoiding indirectly paying federal income tax if you eat food or consume any other goods or services. It's pretty plausible that such people don't really exist, and even if some did, the penalty still applies to everyone else.
And even for the hypothetical person who somehow directly and indirectly paid actual zero in all taxes, if they stop doing the thing, their personal finances still see the same disincentive as everyone else -- they still get penalized for not doing it. If we had a UBI and then someone got cited for speeding but the speeding fine was less than the UBI, would you say that they aren't being penalized for speeding? No, because if they hadn't gotten the citation they would have gotten more. And so it is with not doing something.
The reason this is important is that there are things the government isn't supposed to punish you for doing, meaning they're not to give you any disincentive of any kind. Offering you money -- which for substantially everyone in real life is actually their own money -- and then taking it away if you do the thing they're not allowed to punish you for doing, is punishing you for doing it.
A lot of your argument presupposes a distinct lack of parental authority in the education of a child.
The way that it appears to be playing out is that parents were repulsed by perverted and strange worldviews being taught to their children on their dime. They called their legislators to make the changes and, in a rare event, the legislators listened and are acting upon it.
The system, for once, seems to be working. Both sides should see the objective value in at least that.
> The way that it appears to be playing out is that parents were repulsed by perverted and strange worldviews being taught to their children on their dime.
This variation of the origin story gets a lot of play. However it doesn't address the outside book-ban groups who provide titles to parents - or who just appear at school board meetings themselves.
Eleven "super requesters" — those who raised concerns about or challenged
15 or more titles at a time — accounted for 73% of the targeted books.
They often referred to lists of books originating in other districts
or from online forums. Some had no children in the district.
In nearly 60 cases, the school district didn’t own the book
the requester sought to remove.
> The way that it appears to be playing out is that parents were repulsed by perverted and strange worldviews being taught to their children on their dime.
Part of the purpose of education is exposing students to strange, uncomfortable, and even frightening ideas and giving them the tools to critically think about and even empathize with such ideas. They don’t have to even be “useful” ideas, since it’s important that students are given the tools to grow and become anything they want. It seems like a lot of groups around the country just want students to grow up to become drones working to prop up the economy. Anything that might make people question the nature of society or their role in it must be suppressed according to them.