Comment by SpaceManNabs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SpaceManNabs | Hacker News Reader

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Teachers are leaving the profession en masse because they feel unsafe, unsupported, underpaid, and harassed by national organizations.

Teacher unions list book bans as one of the primary reasons for leaving. They have data and testimony backing that up. We see legislation and organizations all over America.

Here is a quick article describing the number of books being banned and the effects it has on teachers [1]. It list numbers. There are numerous articles all over the internet from well respected organizations like the NYT saying the same stuff.

The numbers are already presented by them. We see the teachers leaving. We know education is suffering from systematic national pressures from both political sides. Feel free to look it up. hell on first principles, book banning has a direct effect on libraries teachers can have when they include such classics. Again, what numbers do you have? Or just first principles logic to dismiss them at all?

[1] : https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/educators-fi...

From first principles, it is normal to ban material. The ages and exact policies are debatable but these articles are entirely one-sided.

It appears that most of the handwringing is about politically disagreeing with the bans, not hardships of obeying bans. There are always bans. But they want this material (sexuality, gender, "race theory") available even to pretty young children because of their societal goals/agenda. Others do not want that. Fight.

This recent WSJ article mentions primarily reasons of salary and student behavior, as any layman would guess from first principles. It did mention "political battles over issues such as how race and gender are discussed". Well, this is not going away -- the battle is fought from multiple directions. Another direction is the industry profits from institutions being morally obligated to buy a lot of new diversity-related books.

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/teachers-leaving-quitt...

> From first principles, it is normal to ban material.

Sure.

> It appears that most of the handwringing is about politically disagreeing with the bans, not hardships of obeying bans

That is not true. The ban list is overly broad. The hobbit is banned in some locations. Harry potter and asoiaf... Maybe high schoolers and middle schoolers shouldn't be reading that stuff. Multiple teachers in multiple districts have been disciplined over books they did not expect. It is far more sustainable for teachers to avoid this issue.

> But they want this material (sexuality, gender, "race theory") available even to pretty young children because of their societal goals/agenda

I am not going to judge this statement's veracity. Let's take it as true. As I mentioned before, the issue would then be that they are also banning other books that have nothing to do with this, and that still makes the jobs of teachers difficult. It is not feasible to have this much overhead on book bans because of political battles and also expect teachers to manage this overhead.

Thanks for sharing your first principles argument. If you have the time, please share some numbers.

There seems to be a lot of "first principles" thinking in this debate which leaves out essential factors. It ignores that children have brains of their own with likes and dislikes who will readily decide for themselves how much they like a book. It gives no benefit of the doubt or generosity to school staff. And it ignores the fact that good libraries are historically a mix of lots of different content that is clearly not all good.

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