I’m not going to suggest it’s a good idea, but I know when math books became a topic it was supposedly because some type of political stuff was being included in the problems. Haven’t followed it closely but I do remember hearing that.
If very limited references to the fact that racism even exists are "political", then you're getting pretty close to that joke: "What sexual orientation are you, straight, or political?"
There's actually a very simple argument: The existing system has been used as a workaround by activists to defacto teach things that shouldn't be taught to students. Keeping the books out of the library is the best practical method of stopping this, because directly controlling the contents of the curriculum is hard to enforce.
That argument may or may not be true in this particular case, but it's not some impossible thing that can't ever have a good reason behind it.
Edit: Also, don't confuse school libraries with public libraries. Schools make content-based decisions about what's appropriate for students all the time.
> Also, don't confuse school libraries with public libraries.
What's the actual meaningful distinction here? Both are publicly funded, that students/kid can choose to go to and browse books in (but rarely do). It's not like kids are banned from public libraries.
For one thing, adults are typically not allowed into school libraries during school hours. It's much easier to keep books away from parents interested in knowing what their kids are reading in a school library than a public one, where parents are more likely to be with their child.
But either way, governments cannot stop you from speaking. However, no government office, neither a school library nor a general public one, is or ought to be required to carry your speech.
> However, no government office, neither a school library nor a general public one, is or ought to be required to carry your speech.
That's the opposite of what's actually going on here, though. What's going on is that speech is being prohibited, not that it's being forced to be allowed.
> The existing system has been used as a workaround by activists to defacto teach things that shouldn't be taught to students.
And who determines, with which justification, what should be taught to students? Teaching science and facts should never be something controversial, and I'd expect teachers to be able (and allowed to) make that decision - they know the children under their responsibility the best, not politicians.
That's a good steel man argument, thanks for articulating it. The irony is, they are solving "activists who defacto teach things that shouldn't be taught" by themselves becoming "activists who ban things from being taught". Opposite side of the same coin.
Translation: The above comment is REALLY mad that kids can learn about the existence of gay people or about how sex and STDs are spread and they feel the need to ensure kids are not told about this topic and that teachers get jail time for mentioning it.
Make no mistake, schools make choices all the time. This decision align those choices to far more insane rules by..guess what...an activist government instead.
A great example of this is John Green's Looking For Alaska. It has a sex scene that is objectively banned by this law.
That very sex scene is an example of why sex should not be the primary goal of a relationship (it goes poorly) and is directly contrasted with a moment of actual love in the very next chapter as an example of how sex is not the most valuable thing about a relationship.
It is a scapegoat for politicians and angry...activist...PTA members to simplify the topic "This book has a charater giving a BLOW JOB!!! My 16 year old is asked to READ IT?! These teachers and librarians are sick!" NOBODY's KID SHOULD READ IT.
Might I add, almost EVERY school keeps a list of alternative books and gives parents the option to opt out.
It's Gay marriage and descriptions of sex today, Alan Turing today cannot be fully explained in a book.
Maybe tomorrow it will be Hitler. "It is too violent of a topic and parents should have the right to keep their kids from reading left-wing details like the holocaust."
What would be the other end? At both extremes there is content that more centrist sides disapprove. Should either of the ends be allowed? Or should it swap around as either side gains power in politics?
It's mandatory state/public education, so the curriculum is legislated and kids are forced to be there, and to start, we have a captive audience. The subject legislation was in response to some arguably extreme cases where there is a concerted effort to distribute lgbtq pornography to kids as a way to use critical theories to shift social norms around sexuality, but uniquely using intersectionality - a recognized political pressure technique to do so. It doesn't work on the majority of adults who see it for what it is, and so its proponents have moved upstream and turned to using the tactic directly on children where they will not encounter resistance to the change they seek to make.
There is little argument that the teachers and advocates for these materials in elementary schools have a stated desire to abolish the civilization these children would otherwise grow up to inherit and become stewards of. Call it what you will, all the words are artifacts of the same basic critical theory and premises ('ist, 'phobic, anti-' etc.) that form a whole new language one either speaks and thinks in, or does not. It's designed to alienate and atomize people so as to manage and extract value from the conflicts you as an activist create. Those words are threats it uses to protect the real underlying ideology from rational scrutiny. From an educational perspective, this is not the drawing out and developing of childrens minds, but rather the funneling and shaping them as an openly stated means to create young activists intent on demolishing the pillars of social stability from which all social growth and progress has emerged.
Instead of having kids and raising them the way religion-based societies and cultures do, mormons, muslims, hindus, christians, etc. and being the change, these activists are leveraging the mandates of the education system to undermine the society they wish to upend. A key front in this is teaching intersectionality, where your beliefs become immutable identities under the umbrella of a system of infinitely regressing subjectivity and criticism instead of deriving a free and independent identity from experience and competence. I'm not going to relitigate intersectionality on this thread other than to say it was invented and not discovered, and all of its proponents' arguments reduce to "everything is made of words, words have no fixed meaning, so nothing has fixed meaning, therefore - all things meaning nothing - my belief is equivalent to your experience, there is only struggle for power, and if you disagree, you are my antagonist." It's nihilism all the way down. They imagine themselves engaged in a kind of science by picking random disciplines and testing them to dissolve in their solipsisms.
To do this, some activists are using pornography as a vehicle to inject this critical narrative into the sexual developent of school children, and adulterate these kids' sense of truth and reality by claiming the new concepts in the minds of children as they begin to apprehend them, with words and narrative that subordinates them to the system of criticism the activists are militating for, and with the neutralizing uncertainties of their theory. Florida's legislature has reacted to it by requiring scrutiny of what goes into those schools.
That is a charitable case for Florida's reaction. I can't defend individuals actuated by deeply held hatreds, or who this view might have something in common with, but if we are going to learn about why someone would go so far as to ban this material, it's important to do so with tools that are not merely the artifacts of the hall of mirrors critical theory solipsisms this virus is using to fillibuster, disrupt, harass, and delay rational discussion about it.
There isn't a bland news source that covers the stories of parents reading the explicit content out loud from books at their kids' schools at school board meetings, but it is common enough that Florida responded to it with legislation. If you would like to track down the stories that made the legislation viable, those instances are where I would recommend starting. The most recent example in the news was from a controversy in California about the governor's wife's charity being used to distribute similar material through the school system.
Toward quality discussion, the culture war issue over this isn't just about provincials banning books and how it's a symbolic faux pas, there are very real networks and NGOs coordinating to spread this specific ideology as a means to destablize societies so as to coopt and dominate them, using a really old playbook, and the tools themselves are the conflict and outrage itself, not the details of what those are about. The Florida legislation isn't just a sop to a reactionary base, it's strategic by people who have just begun to fight something they recognize as much worse. When you stop seeing your opponents as merely ignorant and realize they're being as smart and strategic as you are, it's a very different perspective.
For background, I would read Arendt and Solzhenitsyn who saw it first hand, and as a foundation for what current writers like Mattias Desmet, and in a more accessibly popular sense James Lindsay have been writing about with significant depth. All of them write about how popular movements with good and sincere intentions are co-opted and used as vassals for one much more dangerous movement.
Or, to put it in other words, all you can offer is more rumormongering and fearmongering bullshit that isn't even correct about what actually happened: a single teacher once accidentally showed the wrong version of the educational film The Mask You Live In [1] to 12-year-olds in 2019, which accidentally exposed to them to a few more minutes of knowing that blurred-out pornography exists, and a single parent complained, and then nobody else but the right wing hate-o-sphere ever cared again.
To be clear, I offered a concievable and logical rationale for the Florida legislation that was based on summaries of the ideas that moved the people and legislators to implement it. The intent was ideally someone should be able to respond to it with something smarter.
There are more instances than the one this comment references.
However, I will elaborate further on the ideas of Arendt and Desmet that the object of the overarching movement is to make sure that individuals believe and trust nothing, even their own senses, because it will prevent them from resisting the small cadre of people who have historically followed these tactics with violence and terror to subordinate populations. The root of all social "theory," is to produce intellectually stultifying gibberish engines. It's chaff. Their jargon is designed to cost you time, create uncertainty, and "neutralize" you so that the sufficient condition of good men doing nothing is met.
The charitable rationale for people revolting against social justice in schools is that they recognize it is disingenuous, and that it's incumbent on the advocates of these theories to demonstrate that they are compassionate, honest, magnanimous, humane, and exercise other positive viritues, as if they aren't, you probably don't want them near your kids.
Is this what a charitable case looks like? It sounds like a regurgitation of a conspiratorial fantasy. I'd hate to see what the uncharitable case looks like.
Which for some, (like me), is ludicrous. My own take is that children learn best (or for some, learn at all) when their interest in something is piqued or they are inspired by a teacher. (I only did homework for teachers I liked throughout my time in elementary and high school.) I claim most of what we learn in school is completely irrelevant to our lives anyway (with a clear exception of learning to read at all). My wife rose to an executive position in a big company without knowing her 'times tables'. "Teaching the curriculum" also leads to the textbooks that came into use after the "No child left behind" legislation. When I read them, I was simultaneously outraged and wanted to cry at (a) how dry they were (b) how memorization-focused they were (c) (for Euclidian Geometry) how much wrong information they contained.
With billions of books in the world, having a very short white list of books means the chances of a teacher suggesting a book that would inspire a particular kid plummets. We get a little closer to Farenheit 451 every passing day.
Perhaps. She did know how to use a calculator, and generally she does better at arithmetic things than I do (balancing the checkbook, eg.) because she knows she's not good, whereas I know I'm good, so I'm more careless. Also, math wasn't and isn't important in many jobs, including hers. So "explains a lot of the problems this country is in" isn't the stunning argument for your side you may believe it to be. No offense intended.
> interest in something is piqued or they are inspired by a teacher
Don't you see how this is a direct example of teachers having outsized influence on students, and how they shouldn't be allowed to 'teach' them whatever the please?
People put education on some kind of pedestal. Like it's a magical place of discovery. No, it's to provide basic literacy and math skills to the poor so they can function in society.
Conceptually, if the government defines the teaching, at what point do the people run the government and at what point does the government run the people?
Also, politics in America are way more messy than that. The choice becomes "People you agree 50% with or people you agree 20% with?". I would bet that if this were put to a statewide vote, it would not pass.
The community/voters define the government and the government defines the teaching.
Which entity is more in touch with the wants and needs of Florida voters: Florida's state and local governments or the federal government in Washington?
The hiring of teachers is approved by community elected school boards.
FL laws take that power from communities and puts it in State level hands. Your point is upside-down and tries to paint heavy handed big-government rules as better in fact.
Also who said anything about DC? The point was about letting teachers, parents, and yes, minors; make choices for kids. This is whitewashing extremist beliefs over communities that very well may disagree, exactly what you imply this protects lol.
Why do you think the majority of Floridians are OK with this? Does it matter to American politicians that the majority of Americans are in favor of access to abortions? The noisy people and PACs who donate to campaigns are against it and that's all that matters.
I am not familiar with them being well known for lies or fraud. Showing actual video seems like a way to avoid that. The videos seem to speak for themselves. Even if taken out of context it looks reaaaally bad.
It didn't used to be a law, so clearly something has happened that made this idea popular enough to be passed into law.
I guess teachers thought that because they have access to other people's children, they're allowed to put whatever ideas into their heads that they please. Those days are coming to a close.
Let me be clear that I do not agree at all, in any way with this argument, I'm just answering your question as to what the opinion of people who like this think.
There are books which contain explicit depictions of sex between teenagers. Why do you want teenagers thinking that having sex before you are 18 is normal? Kids shouldn't be reading stuff about sex (gay, straight, or otherwise) before they are adults. The only people who would be opposed to that sort of thing are groomers.
A lot of people replying to this skipped over part of this comment.
I DO NOT AGREE WITH THIS ARGUMENT. I AM JUST PUTTING IT HERE TO ANSWER THE QUESTION!!!!
> Why do you want teenagers thinking that having sex before you are 18 is normal?
Having some form of sexual interaction with peers certainly isn't universal but it is well within "normal" for teenagers. The mechanisms of our legal system require us to treat majority as a binary state that people just switch on one day at age 18, but actual development doesn't work like that in any way.
If you enforce on actual people the legal fiction that no one under 18 has ever encountered sexual material in the world or in their own mind, you're creating all sorts of vulnerabilities for them when they do reach 18 and have minimal awareness of their own boundaries, right to have them, and practice enforcing them.
> The only people who would be opposed to that sort of thing are groomers.
"Groomers" is very commonly used in this context as a homophoblic slur, conflating queer people with child abuse and pedophilia. If that's not your intention I suggest you don't use it in this way in conversations like this. Grooming is certainly a very serious form of child abuse. Coincidentally I'm sure, depictions of it are also banned by this restriction on books. You are not going to help youths realize they are in this situation if you prevent them from ever engaging with the stories of others who have been.
Yeah. It's rather important to be able to tell the difference between educational books about sex, normal, healthy sexual relationships, and porn. I can understand banning porn that encourages unrealistic expectations from sex (which is a problem), and the other two. If you ban the other two, you can bet children will learn about sex from porn.
Or not at all and be really surprised when they get pregnant.
Because having sex before you are 18 is quite normal? It is odd to pretend otherwise, but 16 for example is quite an usual age, at least here in Europe. I doubt it is actually different in the US.
Most people in the world are sexually active before 18. Your teenage years are you prime years of curiosity. Now, yes, they shouldn't be engaging in sexual activities with older, more mature people. But there's zero problem in late teens just being teens and discovering themselves. The more information they have on how to do that safely, the better. This law (and your puritan line of thinking) does the exact opposite. Expect to see a rise in teenage STDs and pregnancy.
Here's the thing: The argument you have articulated there, whether you agree with it or not, is not actually what is being argued (or at least is not all that is being argued).
It's not actually primarily "books which contain explicit depictions of sex between teenagers" that are being challenged by this. It's books talking about the existence of gay, trans, and other queer people as something other than a horrible sin or a mental defect.
If it were just what you say, then yes, that would still be wrong, and stupid...but what it is, in fact, is wrong, stupid, and horrendously bigoted.
The problem with some of these books is that they normalise horrendous practices, e.g. extreme sex acts like anal fisting, or extreme body modifications like young girls having their breasts amputated because they have a false belief that they are boys.
The books that just talk about standard sex education and give an overview of sexuality aren't a problem. It's these other ones that attempt to push the boundaries to their extremes, that parents and teachers are pushing back on.
So you think being trans is fake and comparable with anal fisting. Cool cool. That means you are precisely one of the people I described, trying to ban books about the existence of gay, trans, and other queer people.
I guarantee you there aren't more than 1 or 2 parents or teachers in the entire country (possibly not even that many, but there's always some nutcase somewhere) who genuinely think that having books on anal fisting available to elementary schoolers is a good thing.
Books on being trans aren't remotely comparable. And, just as an aside, if someone realizes they're trans before they go any significant amount through puberty, they can take very safe hormone treatments in order to ensure they never have to have more expensive and potentially traumatic surgery to present as their true gender.
Unlike books on sexuality, many of these pro-trans books normalise irreversible bodily modifications and present this as if it's a positive thing.
If mature adults want to take wrong-sex hormones, get bits chopped off and turned inside out, and so on, after a long period of consultation and contemplation, then that's acceptable, if that's what they truly need.
But showing this stuff to kids, as if it's a normal option? No way. This is child abuse.
It's also completely unlike being gay, lesbian or bisexual, where no bodily changes whatsoever are encouraged or needed. Also there's no identifying as something you're not, into groups where you don't belong, i.e. so many males thinking it's their right to barge into as many female-only spaces as possible. Really the T is nothing like the LGB at all, it's just that activists use the latter as a shield against criticism of the absurd and abusive demands they're making.
I'm not completely sure that everyone making this argument actually believes it. Presumably there are some who do, but I suspect there's a large portion of people who are looking for a way to selectively fire teachers they don't like. Certainly there are politicians who benefit from stoking outrage, and supporters who enjoy boasting of their commitment to their cause by taking an extreme position on a culture war issue.
> Why do you want teenagers thinking that having sex before you are 18 is normal?
It is normal. Actually, it's more normal than having sex for the first time after the age of 18, statistically speaking; while the average age of virginity loss in the US has gradually increased over time, it's still at something like 17.
> Why do you want teenagers thinking that having sex before you are 18 is normal?
It is normal. Teenagers have sex all of the time, and to ignore it and pretend it doesn't happen is dangerous.
> Kids shouldn't be reading stuff about sex (gay, straight, or otherwise) before they are adults.
Yes, they should. How else do they become functional adults? They need to learn so they can make the right choices when it comes to sex, whether that's abstinence, birth control, etc.
> The only people who would be opposed to that sort of thing are groomers.
Yikes. So you're saying people who teach sex ed are "groomers"? If I give my kid a "birds and the bees" book when she's a teenager or younger, I'm a "groomer"? I'm getting the feeling that this is just more right-wing projection.
It's unfortunate that Hacker News doesn't support bold text. I would have bolded it if I could - it seems like a lot of people replying to me completely missed that I don't actually agree with any of these arguments, and am just telling people arguments that those on the other side make.
My eyes also fell directly to your second paragraph and I immediately thought you should step away from the compiler and experience the world if you really believe this. It’s because you wrote it like you were making the argument and there was no separation between yourself in the context it was written.
I’ll see if I can find a link.
EDIT: Found one. https://nypost.com/2022/04/22/floridas-banned-math-textbooks...