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Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

I've banned a number of books from my household as I don't want my child exposed to them. And I support banning them from the school. Children aren't adults. It's reasonable to expect that education caters to a common denominator within society. I would only have a problem if adults couldn't acquire these books.

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A family we know got swept up in the "banned books" movement. They repost banned book content on their Instagram and even got T-shirts with witty sayings about supporting banned books.

They bought some books for their kids from a banned books list thinking they were "banned" for thought-control reasons, but opened one up to find an illustrated guide to using mobile phone apps to find partners for anonymous hook-ups and a guide to following through with it.

The book clearly wasn't appropriate for their young children, so they hid it away. Now we joke that they've also banned the book.

A lot of books are getting banned from schools because they mention gay characters or other "woke" content. Not at all the same thing.

Can you list some of these books you want removed from school libraries, along with why?

Mein Kampf?

No, make it part of the curriculum. Read it and shown how boring and stupid it is.

Demystify such nonsense

> Read it and shown how boring and stupid it is.

Except it's not, or it couldn't have continued to radicalize people to this very day.

... Wait, are you claiming that people are, having not previously been exposed to Nazism, reading it, and going "well, this seems like a pretty good idea really"? I'm fairly sure that's not a thing. No-one's being radicalised by it; rather the only people who really read it are already radicalised, because, otherwise, why would you bother?

There may be books which radicalise people. But I'm fairly sure Mein Kampf is not one of them.

I doubt that most owner have read it completely.

Like the bible people mostly know the parts of it that fit their own agenda.

And don’t underestimate the effect it has if you are forced to read a book in school from front to back and write essays about it.

People choose to commit atrocities in the name of the famous holy books - you either support banning them as well or concede there's something more to it.

The irony of Mein Kampf suffering the streisand effect is not lost.

To a common denominator yes but if you aim for too much breath then you miss out on a lot of good things if you ban until almost everyone is satisfied. And some fads that get popular to ban things I disagree with like when people said violent games were the reason for violence or that rock and metal music made teenagers angry or that grunge makes them kill themselves. Many times some groups latch on to some popular culture topic as the reason for X pre-existing problem of the world.

Note that children do become adults while in (high) school. It's common for book-banners to imply that they are removing books from elementary school kids when they are actually removing them from adults and almost-adults in high schools.

Sure. The place for these adults to get books is the county/city library and not the school library. As I said, there's a certain common denominator that we need to respect when talking about public schools.

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