If anybody thinks this is a good idea, I'm looking forward to reading your opinions.
I’ll see if I can find a link.
EDIT: Found one. https://nypost.com/2022/04/22/floridas-banned-math-textbooks...
That argument may or may not be true in this particular case, but it's not some impossible thing that can't ever have a good reason behind it.
Edit: Also, don't confuse school libraries with public libraries. Schools make content-based decisions about what's appropriate for students all the time.
And who determines, with which justification, what should be taught to students? Teaching science and facts should never be something controversial, and I'd expect teachers to be able (and allowed to) make that decision - they know the children under their responsibility the best, not politicians.
lol. May I introduce you to the right-wing south. They can't even agree on the age of the earth.
What's the actual meaningful distinction here? Both are publicly funded, that students/kid can choose to go to and browse books in (but rarely do). It's not like kids are banned from public libraries.
But either way, governments cannot stop you from speaking. However, no government office, neither a school library nor a general public one, is or ought to be required to carry your speech.
That's the opposite of what's actually going on here, though. What's going on is that speech is being prohibited, not that it's being forced to be allowed.
Make no mistake, schools make choices all the time. This decision align those choices to far more insane rules by..guess what...an activist government instead.
A great example of this is John Green's Looking For Alaska. It has a sex scene that is objectively banned by this law.
That very sex scene is an example of why sex should not be the primary goal of a relationship (it goes poorly) and is directly contrasted with a moment of actual love in the very next chapter as an example of how sex is not the most valuable thing about a relationship. It is a scapegoat for politicians and angry...activist...PTA members to simplify the topic "This book has a charater giving a BLOW JOB!!! My 16 year old is asked to READ IT?! These teachers and librarians are sick!" NOBODY's KID SHOULD READ IT.
Might I add, almost EVERY school keeps a list of alternative books and gives parents the option to opt out.
It's Gay marriage and descriptions of sex today, Alan Turing today cannot be fully explained in a book.
Maybe tomorrow it will be Hitler. "It is too violent of a topic and parents should have the right to keep their kids from reading left-wing details like the holocaust."
What things? Can you provide specific examples, lesson plans, or classes of these concepts being taught?
It's mandatory state/public education, so the curriculum is legislated and kids are forced to be there, and to start, we have a captive audience. The subject legislation was in response to some arguably extreme cases where there is a concerted effort to distribute lgbtq pornography to kids as a way to use critical theories to shift social norms around sexuality, but uniquely using intersectionality - a recognized political pressure technique to do so. It doesn't work on the majority of adults who see it for what it is, and so its proponents have moved upstream and turned to using the tactic directly on children where they will not encounter resistance to the change they seek to make.
There is little argument that the teachers and advocates for these materials in elementary schools have a stated desire to abolish the civilization these children would otherwise grow up to inherit and become stewards of. Call it what you will, all the words are artifacts of the same basic critical theory and premises ('ist, 'phobic, anti-' etc.) that form a whole new language one either speaks and thinks in, or does not. It's designed to alienate and atomize people so as to manage and extract value from the conflicts you as an activist create. Those words are threats it uses to protect the real underlying ideology from rational scrutiny. From an educational perspective, this is not the drawing out and developing of childrens minds, but rather the funneling and shaping them as an openly stated means to create young activists intent on demolishing the pillars of social stability from which all social growth and progress has emerged.
Instead of having kids and raising them the way religion-based societies and cultures do, mormons, muslims, hindus, christians, etc. and being the change, these activists are leveraging the mandates of the education system to undermine the society they wish to upend. A key front in this is teaching intersectionality, where your beliefs become immutable identities under the umbrella of a system of infinitely regressing subjectivity and criticism instead of deriving a free and independent identity from experience and competence. I'm not going to relitigate intersectionality on this thread other than to say it was invented and not discovered, and all of its proponents' arguments reduce to "everything is made of words, words have no fixed meaning, so nothing has fixed meaning, therefore - all things meaning nothing - my belief is equivalent to your experience, there is only struggle for power, and if you disagree, you are my antagonist." It's nihilism all the way down. They imagine themselves engaged in a kind of science by picking random disciplines and testing them to dissolve in their solipsisms.
To do this, some activists are using pornography as a vehicle to inject this critical narrative into the sexual developent of school children, and adulterate these kids' sense of truth and reality by claiming the new concepts in the minds of children as they begin to apprehend them, with words and narrative that subordinates them to the system of criticism the activists are militating for, and with the neutralizing uncertainties of their theory. Florida's legislature has reacted to it by requiring scrutiny of what goes into those schools.
That is a charitable case for Florida's reaction. I can't defend individuals actuated by deeply held hatreds, or who this view might have something in common with, but if we are going to learn about why someone would go so far as to ban this material, it's important to do so with tools that are not merely the artifacts of the hall of mirrors critical theory solipsisms this virus is using to fillibuster, disrupt, harass, and delay rational discussion about it.
Which activists would those be, and what pornography?
Toward quality discussion, the culture war issue over this isn't just about provincials banning books and how it's a symbolic faux pas, there are very real networks and NGOs coordinating to spread this specific ideology as a means to destablize societies so as to coopt and dominate them, using a really old playbook, and the tools themselves are the conflict and outrage itself, not the details of what those are about. The Florida legislation isn't just a sop to a reactionary base, it's strategic by people who have just begun to fight something they recognize as much worse. When you stop seeing your opponents as merely ignorant and realize they're being as smart and strategic as you are, it's a very different perspective.
For background, I would read Arendt and Solzhenitsyn who saw it first hand, and as a foundation for what current writers like Mattias Desmet, and in a more accessibly popular sense James Lindsay have been writing about with significant depth. All of them write about how popular movements with good and sincere intentions are co-opted and used as vassals for one much more dangerous movement.
There are more instances than the one this comment references.
However, I will elaborate further on the ideas of Arendt and Desmet that the object of the overarching movement is to make sure that individuals believe and trust nothing, even their own senses, because it will prevent them from resisting the small cadre of people who have historically followed these tactics with violence and terror to subordinate populations. The root of all social "theory," is to produce intellectually stultifying gibberish engines. It's chaff. Their jargon is designed to cost you time, create uncertainty, and "neutralize" you so that the sufficient condition of good men doing nothing is met.
The charitable rationale for people revolting against social justice in schools is that they recognize it is disingenuous, and that it's incumbent on the advocates of these theories to demonstrate that they are compassionate, honest, magnanimous, humane, and exercise other positive viritues, as if they aren't, you probably don't want them near your kids.
Didn't you ever read a book that wasn't prescribed by the curriculum?
Don't take my nuance to mean that I approve of this or think it's a good idea.
I don't know. I don't live in Florida. If it's not against the law why should I care?
> Does it matter to American politicians that the majority of Americans are in favor of access to abortions?
Abortion is legal in my state. ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
Also, politics in America are way more messy than that. The choice becomes "People you agree 50% with or people you agree 20% with?". I would bet that if this were put to a statewide vote, it would not pass.
Which entity is more in touch with the wants and needs of Florida voters: Florida's state and local governments or the federal government in Washington?
FL laws take that power from communities and puts it in State level hands. Your point is upside-down and tries to paint heavy handed big-government rules as better in fact.
Also who said anything about DC? The point was about letting teachers, parents, and yes, minors; make choices for kids. This is whitewashing extremist beliefs over communities that very well may disagree, exactly what you imply this protects lol.
With billions of books in the world, having a very short white list of books means the chances of a teacher suggesting a book that would inspire a particular kid plummets. We get a little closer to Farenheit 451 every passing day.
Don't you see how this is a direct example of teachers having outsized influence on students, and how they shouldn't be allowed to 'teach' them whatever the please?
People put education on some kind of pedestal. Like it's a magical place of discovery. No, it's to provide basic literacy and math skills to the poor so they can function in society.
Well that alone explains a lot of the problems this country is in, and is not the stunning argument for your side you may believe it to be.
I guess teachers thought that because they have access to other people's children, they're allowed to put whatever ideas into their heads that they please. Those days are coming to a close.
There are books which contain explicit depictions of sex between teenagers. Why do you want teenagers thinking that having sex before you are 18 is normal? Kids shouldn't be reading stuff about sex (gay, straight, or otherwise) before they are adults. The only people who would be opposed to that sort of thing are groomers.
A lot of people replying to this skipped over part of this comment.
I DO NOT AGREE WITH THIS ARGUMENT. I AM JUST PUTTING IT HERE TO ANSWER THE QUESTION!!!!
It is normal. Teenagers have sex all of the time, and to ignore it and pretend it doesn't happen is dangerous.
> Kids shouldn't be reading stuff about sex (gay, straight, or otherwise) before they are adults.
Yes, they should. How else do they become functional adults? They need to learn so they can make the right choices when it comes to sex, whether that's abstinence, birth control, etc.
> The only people who would be opposed to that sort of thing are groomers.
Yikes. So you're saying people who teach sex ed are "groomers"? If I give my kid a "birds and the bees" book when she's a teenager or younger, I'm a "groomer"? I'm getting the feeling that this is just more right-wing projection.
Having some form of sexual interaction with peers certainly isn't universal but it is well within "normal" for teenagers. The mechanisms of our legal system require us to treat majority as a binary state that people just switch on one day at age 18, but actual development doesn't work like that in any way.
If you enforce on actual people the legal fiction that no one under 18 has ever encountered sexual material in the world or in their own mind, you're creating all sorts of vulnerabilities for them when they do reach 18 and have minimal awareness of their own boundaries, right to have them, and practice enforcing them.
> The only people who would be opposed to that sort of thing are groomers.
"Groomers" is very commonly used in this context as a homophoblic slur, conflating queer people with child abuse and pedophilia. If that's not your intention I suggest you don't use it in this way in conversations like this. Grooming is certainly a very serious form of child abuse. Coincidentally I'm sure, depictions of it are also banned by this restriction on books. You are not going to help youths realize they are in this situation if you prevent them from ever engaging with the stories of others who have been.
People under 18 have sex all the time, and they should absolutely be reading stuff about sex before then.
Or not at all and be really surprised when they get pregnant.
It is normal. Actually, it's more normal than having sex for the first time after the age of 18, statistically speaking; while the average age of virginity loss in the US has gradually increased over time, it's still at something like 17.
It's not actually primarily "books which contain explicit depictions of sex between teenagers" that are being challenged by this. It's books talking about the existence of gay, trans, and other queer people as something other than a horrible sin or a mental defect.
If it were just what you say, then yes, that would still be wrong, and stupid...but what it is, in fact, is wrong, stupid, and horrendously bigoted.
The books that just talk about standard sex education and give an overview of sexuality aren't a problem. It's these other ones that attempt to push the boundaries to their extremes, that parents and teachers are pushing back on.
I guarantee you there aren't more than 1 or 2 parents or teachers in the entire country (possibly not even that many, but there's always some nutcase somewhere) who genuinely think that having books on anal fisting available to elementary schoolers is a good thing.
Books on being trans aren't remotely comparable. And, just as an aside, if someone realizes they're trans before they go any significant amount through puberty, they can take very safe hormone treatments in order to ensure they never have to have more expensive and potentially traumatic surgery to present as their true gender.
If mature adults want to take wrong-sex hormones, get bits chopped off and turned inside out, and so on, after a long period of consultation and contemplation, then that's acceptable, if that's what they truly need.
But showing this stuff to kids, as if it's a normal option? No way. This is child abuse.
It's also completely unlike being gay, lesbian or bisexual, where no bodily changes whatsoever are encouraged or needed. Also there's no identifying as something you're not, into groups where you don't belong, i.e. so many males thinking it's their right to barge into as many female-only spaces as possible. Really the T is nothing like the LGB at all, it's just that activists use the latter as a shield against criticism of the absurd and abusive demands they're making.