What is the best argument for allowing elementary school children to read about sexaul intercourse?
Or, in the case of this article, about public, non-school libraries.
(I guess an elementary school kid or middle school kid could order a book via the inter-library loan system, but that's sort of a stupid caveat since typing pornhub.com into a smartphone or desktop browser is several orders of magnitude easier than knowing about and learning how to use the ILL system.)
First, we’re not talking to kids about intercourse. We’re saying kids need to have some amount of knowledge about this stuff that is appropriate for their age.
For example, small kids who are put into the care of strangers need to be aware that adults are not allowed to touch them without permission. They need to know the proper names for their private parts because it’s more difficult to understand if a kid is being abused when they’re using strange euphemisms. They need to understand that they shouldn’t be ashamed to tell an adult if someone touches them in a way that makes them uncomfortable.
Are these conversations I want to have with my young child? Hell no! But they’re necessary for a kid his age. I wouldn’t be doing my job as a parent if I didn’t teach him these things.
The reality is that it’s going to be a series of age appropriate conversations every few years, because he’s going to need to know a little more as he gets older.
And if parents are sending their kids into the world without this kind of age appropriate information then they’re putting their kids at serious risk for abuse. Frankly, this is the kind of situation where I’d be glad that schools and libraries are making age appropriate materials like this available for kids; to help the kids whose parents aren’t doing their jobs.
As for top-down meddling, I agree with that. The Department of Education has been the worst thing for America's education system, not to mention half-baked federal policies on healthy eating.
The issue is that teachers and the administration are the government in most places. So if we are to have less meddling it would be to empower the parents to make decisions - to draw the line as you say - and force the schools and the teachers to follow that line.
State legislatures are mostly not democratic. Rather than implementing the will of their constituents, state legislators spend their time campaigning and representing for those who fund their campaigning. TFA is just another example.
"...to draw the line as you say..."
To be clear, you introduced this banal cliche, and I used it once in response.
If you oppose top-down meddling in public education then I assume you support vouchers? That's about as bottom-up as things get.
Indeed. I think jessuastin probably meant something like nationalized identity-driven politics. It's a valid difference.
> If you oppose top-down meddling in public education then I assume you support vouchers? That's about as bottom-up as things get.
I like choice but not vouchers. There are basically two issues with vouchers.
The first is that they're usually implemented in a fashion that is simultaneously regressive (on income) and re-distributive (on geography). Ie, they're often implemented as pure grift.
The second, and more important, is that we already have experimented with a hybrid public/private system where some public funds flow to private options! The result is runaway spending and the market driving emphasis toward a bunch of bullshit cost disease stuff instead of actual learning outcomes. No matter how bad our public K12 system is, you will never convince me that our higher ed system is better, and that's what an American public/private hybrid system would, empirically, end up converging to.
I could get behind a voucher system that (1) gives each kid the same amount of cash and also (2) caps all tuition and fees for any school receiving even a dollar of voucher cash.
I'd also be okay with just not providing state funding for education at all, but it'd be a sort of terrible world for most families and I genuinely wonder how many people realize how bad things would get for most families...
The unwarranted assumption you make in this comment is that legislation in USA reflects the will of the population. That is very rarely the case, and this is a perfect example. No one in this state woke up this morning worried about porn in an elementary school library.
I support vouchers, because even imperfect improvements are improvements. If a child isn't being served by a school, even poor parents should be able to do something about that. We can imagine a world in which the public schools offer enough options to help every child, but we don't live there yet.
Bad assumption. That's a fundamental POV difference between "I pay taxes to fund the public education system" and "I pay taxes to pay for kids to go to some school". The notion that those tax dollars belong to the parents and not specifically the public school system depends on which of those you think is, or should be, the case.
For my part, if the money's not exclusively funding the public school system, I don't want to pay any taxes toward schools. Talk about bottom up!
[EDIT] FWIW I'm actually for allowing districts to experiment with this, because I doubt mine would do it and I think the results would be hilarious, but would prefer not to have to move to another state to avoid it, so would rather the red parts of my state not impose it on my district.
I wouldn't assume any elementary-school librarian is stocking the kind of books you're concerned about, and I think it's possible you're being fed a line by politicians and the media, to drum up outrage and support for a narrative.
The books these conservatives want to ban aren't porn, they're complex stories about complex topics that your kids may have to deal with themselves. If you don't want them reading that stuff do your job as a parent.
They're not talking about porn, they're talking about any coming of age story that deals with sex at all.
However, this law applies to more than just libraries. I know of at least one case when I was in High School where a teacher was accused of giving a student a Play Boy magazine and I believe this case played a part in that teachers dismissal.
I never said that I felt the law was necessary, only that I read it and that it is not what is being portrayed here.
Of course that solution would be objected to by both sides. The social leftists think it's literally a death sentence to trans children to not teach 6-year-olds about anal sex, and populist conservatives think sex ed in any capacity is degenerate pedophilia.
Where... where has any leftist said that?