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Comment by chaseadam17 | Hacker News Reader

Seems like most of the books deal with complex real-world issues like sexual identity, racism, school shootings, etc. and are banned due to "sexual" or "violent" content. My guess is these criteria can be selectively interpreted to target books that go against political or cultural beliefs but there is obviously some merit to wanting to protect young kids from certain topics. I wish the article mentioned what ages the books are banned for because that seems like an important piece of data. I'm assuming it includes all K-12 public schools?

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That's part of the issue. With Idaho it's black and white. Under 18, these books are banned.

I'd agree with limiting access based on age, but a lot of these laws have a binary if not outright ban on library access.

What's appropriate to a 10, 12, 14, and 16 year old is pretty broad as these kids mature fast in a few short years. I see no reason why any 16 year old should be restricted from any book.

Agree it shouldn't be so binary. Only thing I'd add is that I believe it makes sense for schools to err towards restricting books until the upper age limit of "appropriate" because parents who choose to expose their kids to those topics earlier can still do so (e.g. by borrowing the book from the public library or giving their kid more permissive internet access) without having tax dollars used to undermine the values of those who don't. It's not an easy issue but for better or worse, I'd bet what books schools "ban" actually has fairly little impact on what kids are exposed to, so this might all be increasingly a mute point.

I was.. precocious as a youngster and read books that were far above my grade level and what most adults would consider to be "safe" for children.

The first time I tried to check out one of those very adult books the librarian called my parents and asked if it was OK. My parents said "Yes. Let him have whatever he wants." They made a note in my account and the next day they let me have have whatever I wanted.

If that hadn't happened I would be a very different, and much dumber, person now.

I don't understand what the issue is with just asking the parents?

I suspect that most of the people responsible for these "bans" don't want that to happen because some parents will approve of things they don't. Most of this really IS an attempted ban rather than just "appropriate age related content" issue. They don't want to control what THEIR kids can see. They want to control what YOUR kids can see.

I think that's a good system. Simply marking an age range for a book and contacting parents if they stray out seems like a more than acceptable way to handle things.

Because the modern system is that the parenting has been offloaded onto the school. The reason we have sex-ed is because we can't trust parents to do that.

The notion that the school board would simply ask a parent, then deal with the parents from kid A complaining that they read a book checked out by kid B is out there.

We run our schools to a lowest common denominator system.

That's the way it is, but is that the way it should be?

We had a better system once (maybe only in this one way). We can do it again.

The controversy comes from parents disagreeing about which topics and books public schools should protect children from. If some parents want certain books removed and others want them kept, whose preferences should prevail? Should we give a minority a veto over books the majority finds valuable?

Cue the argument about a wolf, a fox, and a rabbit voting on what's for dinner.

For that analogy to really apply to this case, we have to show that keeping books that the minority of parents object to causes irreparable/fatal harm to the minority.

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