These days remind me of a time when I was in middle school. My mom was a member of the public library’s parent group. They would read books to determine the age group to place them in.
I had one of the books at school that I would read on the playground. It was a ‘coming of age’ about a young girl being raised by her sister in poverty. There was a scene about here sister having her baby in their bathroom because they couldn’t afford to go to the hospital and the baby died. She cleaned up the bathroom while here sister buried the baby.
I was called to the principal’s office and was met by him and and a teacher. I had accidentally left my book in a classroom. They started yelling at me about being trash to their school and asked me where I got it. When I told them from my mother gave it to me and what she was doing, they stared blankly at me speechless, handed me my book, and sent me back to class.
My guess is that’s all those two read…completely out of context.
I am so thankful my mom shared that book with me…every book with me. More so due to the fact that she was never a big reader. BUT she knew I was and had the good sense to understand her child more than a narrow-minded school system did.
Historically book bans/burnings have served no purpose other than controlling free thought. They are almost always politically/ theologicaly motivated.
I think you might have missed the point. as long as the parents are buying them, ok but to have them open for others who might not be ready for them, not ok.
@Puppycat23 i think this has to do with children and having inappropriate books with porn in it. I saw a video that an 11 year old was reading from a book in his library. it was very sexually explicit with bad language. he didn't know until he checked it out. that was what i was trying to say.
Well the point of banning books in public libraries is to get people used to the idea of book bans in general. Eventually, if the Republicans control congress, they'll start banning books from private companies too.
@Musicman So here is what actually happened. The company that owns Dr Seuss' work decided to stop publishing five of his books. That's all. Nobody banned those books, you can still buy them online, the company just isn't making new copies of those five books anymore. And it had nothing to do with the Democrats. This was a decisions made by a private company.
See, this is what happens when you get your news from right-wing media.
Most importantly, who should exercise control over what others read? Saying parents need to decide is just another way to promote fascism. If the parents aren't exposed to literature when they are taught, how can they then decide what their children should read? Most parents that are opposed to some books, admit to never having read the very books they seem to ban. I remember struggling over Huck Finn, delving deeply into it. Have those than want it banned? There are so many "banned" books that are fundamental to education.
Well that's to let the people who want their children to read about gay sex and oral sex and maps and other perversions so they can this way the Christian family doesn't have to deal with that garbage.
@Disgustedman The "christian family" is already full of MAPS. They don't want children reading about pedos cause they want them to fall victim to church sex abuse easier.
"You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye." - Matt 7:5
@jshm2 All that is true to a point but are all the proscribed books written to encourage breaking the law by inciting, say, racism or violence, or burglary or drugs-dealing? Or they proscribed merely for showing social views not to the censors' personal tastes or agreement? Difficult, delicate social questions have always been a mainstay of the arts, and trying to hide them does not help them.
If the latter, if this about the bans in some American state education systems I am very surprised it can goes as far as a massive great American company like Amazon being affected or taking any notice of it - except perhaps by launching a legal action against the ban. If it did, that would probably become very awkward and embarrassing abroad for the self-styled "Leader of the Free World".
What would be the position of someone in such a State buying it privately, in a shop, if not locally then perhaps in another State, or on a holiday abroad? Or receiving it as a gift? Or existing ownership? What would - or could - a school do if some pupil or parent tells it, "Oh we've all read that at home and think it's a great book!"
. It goes beyond the USA, by also affect the reputations and livelihoods of foreign writers.
Some while ago when all this blew up, a British author among the proscribed ones said in an essay she gave about it on BBC Radio Four that one US writer has offered to buy bona-fide students their own copies for them!
I forget writer and title and I have not read her book that incensed the censors, but it is about, or at least contains a theme of, the love between two women of colour.
.
I wonder if [i]1984[/i], [i]Fahrenheit 451[/i] and [i]The Handmaid's Tale [/i]are proscribed - for their censorship and control themes?
I think the school book bans are done by right-wingers to make it easier to groom kids into the right-wing mindset. They need to stamp out compassion for people of other colors and other ways of life in any way they can.
Some books banned in Florida schools [b]https://www.theledger.com/story/news/state/2022/04/26/florida-school-book-bans-these-library-titles-being-reviewed-school-boards/9542938002/[/b]
"From July 2021 to June 2022, PEN America’s Index of School Book Bans lists 2,532 instances of individual books being banned, affecting 1,648 unique book titles."
Also see https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/book-bans-florida-public-schools/
I don't know WHY Florida banned so many math books, but they did. [quote] May 6, 2022 — A Florida Department of Education review of 132 math books has led to the banning of more than 40% of them.[/quote] [b]https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2022/05/06/florida-bans-more-than-40--oif-math-books-after-review[/b]
Florida passed a law in 2022 that said educators could be prosecuted for 3rd degree felony if they display any unapproved books.
And nobody knows what's been approved.
So the only safe way for educators to stay out of jail is to HIDE ALL THE BOOKS!!!
@ElwoodBlues Well, the Binomial Theorem is very subversive and Pi just porn you know...
Seriously though, are the maths books simply caught in a queue caused by assumed guilt making [i]all[/i] books wrong until "approved" (by whom on what criteria?); and perhaps some sort of "approving" by subject?
Consequently having gone through the fiction, the next category just happened to be Mathematics? So perhaps Geography or French text-books would be the next?
Do the censors explain their choices?
When you see this going on in a supposedly liberal (small 'l') nation from a foreign but also democratic (small 'd'!) country, it really is baffling. It's the sort of thing you'd associate with North Korea, which does allow a tiny chink of Western literature in, apparently including plays by Ibsen and Shakespeare, and the Harry Potter novels!
Schools, public libraries and book-sellers here (UK) do try to ensure children are not exposed to books that really are not suitable for them, but they don't resort to politically-driven, draconian laws on displaying and selling them.
I can just imagine what my rather larger-than-life 5th-Form Maths teacher would have said about banning maths books!
@ArishMell I don't know why they banned so many math books. Suggesting the Earth wasn't created in 4004 BC? Who knows.
For school libraries, Florida has created a new system that might be called "freedom of suppression." If a parent complains about a book to someone at a school, that school will remove the book.
BTW, teachers are fleeing Florida in droves. When DeSantis took office they had 2000 open jobs; now it's almost 11,000. FL even changed the rules so not all teachers need a college degree, but they're still desperate for teachers. SAD!!
@ElwoodBlues I followed the link you cited, and it would seem some of the books' exercises are politically biased.... In the wrong way, or at all? Plus one of the authors has the wrong political views.
The journalist also said they object to referring to climate-change. Maybe from fear, I thought....
The guv'nors also dislike something they call "social-emotional learning". I don't know what they mean by that. I wonder if they do?
I wonder if other States are similarly losing teachers; but looking at that map, where can they go?
Freedom of suppression..... So it seems. It's your land and only you who live there have the right to sort it out, but from a foreign country it all looks very worrying indeed.
They start book bans by denying access to young people. This is to control what they learn. Florida and Texas are perfect examples. They want children to learn that the US civil war was about states rights. What they don't want children to know is that it was about states rights [b]to[/b] [b]have slaves. [/b]
@ArishMell No joke intended. Banning books in this modern age, is tantamount to the campaign of burning that was carried out in this 1966 fiction, Fahrenheit 451. An act intended to protect and control citizens; has real life parallels to efforts by the Gestapo in WWII, and the NVM against intellectuals and artists in Vietnam.
And the ongoing campaign today, in schools and public libraries. Against LQBTQ, and religiously controversial publications.
Thankfully, Independent and online self publishing houses do not bend as easily to the push for censorship. Their content is readily accessible and disseminated world wide. They are not bound by regions. Ensuring free thought and expression remains intact.
reading off of a screen is extremely detrimental to one’s eyes.
Have you heard of the Carrington event? It happened and will undoubtedly happen again. Not to mention another factor, the possibility of an EMP occurrence/attack upon our electrical grid.
When you are raised by google, you think technology is the answer to everything.
Unfortunately that is often a real misconception and fallacy that most people I pray don’t ever come to realize is true. if this electrical grid ever goes down for a long period of time, I fear most people won’t be able to handle it.
@Musicman as usual, you made a claim and refuse to cite your sources. In fact the state of VA clarified that the Loudin schools did not ban Dr. Seuss. What happened was that the publisher stated it will stop printing some of the books that the publisher and author's family felt might be called racist. You can find the clarification in many media, printed and electronic. I am not spending time countering your claims, based on false interpretation of what actually happened.
Do not underestimate the accessibility difference between free and $5
There is no total book ban. It is just removal from publicly free access via libraries.
That isn't really a new thing. Books deemed inappropriate or dangerous have always been kept out of public and school libraries. The argument is really about what constitutes inappropriate and dangerous material versus what is being kept out of libraries as a way to reduce exposure to ideas as a means of cultural erasure and ostracization.
[b]no books are banned if you can get them anywhere[/b]. A restriction within a school is called that by hysterical ninnies (and mendacious troublemakers) to ridiculously make Nazi terror comparisons.
In the early blog days we'd invoke Godwin's Law on those fools and they'd be deemed the thread loser immediately.
There are no book bans in the USA. Stop this nonsense
@Renkon Gender Queer: A Memoir by Maia Kobabe All Boys Aren't Blue by George M. Johnson The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison The hate you give by Angie Thomas The Kite runner by Khaled Hosseini
@Renkon it is important for everyone to understand just how bad this is and worse, how, in the past, one of the first steps totalitarian governments takes, is book banning. With ebooks proliferating, what will happen now is anyone's guess.
@dancingtongue Yep. I'm a Bostonion by birth until my mid twenties. I always found the "Bannned in Boston" monika hilarious. Slap that on anything at got fred publicity. I believe a comedy album was released of Lenny Bruce called Banned in Boston. This guy (like Larry Flynt) love him or not, was a hero for free speech
@Slade The idea is that you can get to books if you want to buy buying them. But when the government funds the enterprise as with a public library or school library, the people who fund them (ie taxpayers) are within their rights to determine what the enterprise does including what book it stocks.
@Slade I'm very much against banning books, but I'm not against a publicly supported organization setting standards. I think the idea of a public school library requiring parental consent or having age restrictions on certain books is fine. Amazon doesn't receive public funding, so they can do whatever they want provided it's legal.
You realize they are now taking away access to free ebook sources for kids?
Lets not pretend these bans don't have dire consequences just because we can't think past our noses to figure out what the consequences are beyond "they can still get them online" Most poor people read books from libraries and kids have access only to where their parents take them. They cant go buy books online by themselves. We are talking about kids..not adults.
@JaggedLittlePill I agree, these bans do have dire consequences and that's why I don't support them. I'm in favor of putting a book down that's deemed too controversial/ inappropriate and reading something else instead of going the extra mile to ban them when the book that's banned can still be found and bought elsewhere. That's why I find this whole book ban nonsense, nonsense. And of course a child might not be able to buy a book online or at a bookstore but their parents can if they so desired and have the money.
[b]https://www.theledger.com/story/news/state/2022/04/26/florida-school-book-bans-these-library-titles-being-reviewed-school-boards/9542938002/[/b]
[b]https://pen.org/report/banned-usa-growing-movement-to-censor-books-in-schools/[/b]
