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Comment by bruceb | Hacker News Reader

Alternative headline could be more inappropriate books being pushed on pre teen & teen children. If the people doing most of the stocking of books were fans of Rush Limbaugh )https://www.amazon.com/Childrens-Books-Rush-Limbaugh/s?rh=n%...) or The Turner diaries, I am sure a different set of people would be angry about indoctrination and would want the books out.

This debate needs a lot of context added. HN I hope is more savvy than that other news aggregation site.

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The most banned book, according to the article, is an autobiography with an emphasis on the author questioning gender identity during their adolescence. Over two decades ago my middle school library had three copies of The Color Purple, an autobiography featuring multiple pedophilic rapes, and no member of my cohort was harmed by that.

Instead of idealising the children of today and attributing unrealistic levels of vulnerability to them, consider whether the work sitting on a shelf would have harmed your generation when you were a teenager. It wouldn't, because the human mind is resilient to anything short of Dianetics, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and The Secret.

Love how you implicitly equate a book advocating a white supremacist violent overthrow of the government with Judy Bloom.

Do "Mein Kompf" and "The Audacity of Hope" next, please.

There's a complete moral panic of those who worry that if we tolerate or are comfortable with the idea that there are people who question their gender identity, or are gay, or trans or many other things it will be the end of the world.

Can you add some more context on what you mean by “inappropriate”?

Do you think there is content that is inappropriate for 9 to 14 year olds? What would that be?

Why didn’t you simply answer the question?

I'd definitely accept there is content that some 9-14yos wouldn't have the necessary mental or emotional development to deal well with, and that risks negatively impacting their mental health and turning them towards troublesome behaviour if their home environment is less than ideal. But we've been exposing kids to religious texts that are full of all sorts of horrific descriptions for centuries and it doesn't seem to have done so much harm as to justify removing such books from libraries completely. From what I've read the new books mostly seem rather innocuous - is there really reason to believe they're likely to stir up never- before-seen levels of angst or self-doubt among schoolkids? Or encourage dangerous experimentation with irreversible downsides? That there may be some temporary negative side-effects I'd think is just a price all kids have to pay learning about the more complicated world of adulthood and sexual desires etc., and you can hardly hide that world from them forever.

It was a reasonable question. I think you should answer it rather than counter-interrogate.

Also, you started out mentioning 'teen and pre-teen children', then narrowed it to 'children age 9-14'. Most people assume 'teen' to cover anyone up to the age of 18, at which point they're no longer legally a child.

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