This is a list of books which a member of Texas House of Representatives (Matt Krause) has inquired about from the Texas Education Agency (supposedly at least in part with respect to Texas's version of the "no critical race theory in schools" laws).
Thanks for the link, but your comment is also a bit misleading.
He’s not just casually inquiring the Texas Education Agency, he’s burdening school districts on this wild goose chase which is most likely a political stunt in his campaign for Texas Attorney General.
Quote from the article you linked. I can’t imagine how much time it would take to track this information down for all 850 books on his list, and how these resources would be better spent on actual useful tasks for the school districts.
“Krause informs districts they must provide the committee with the number of copies they have of each book, on what part of campus those books are located and how much money schools spent on the books, as well as information on any other book that violates House Bill 3979, the so-called “critical race theory law”designed to limit how race-related subjects are taught in public schools.”
Yes, neither set of books that either side seeks to ban are necessary or, perhaps, even good for an education in the humanities. Notice they are always relatively recent, usually pop fiction (as opposed to nonfiction) that teachers/librarians enjoyed that's supposed to "teach" you something about an actual historical event. You're supposed to read the fictionalized novel because it's more "relatable", definitely not because it ensures you see things through the preferred ideological lens of 21st century school librarians. (To be fair, the "other" side's banned books are usually what these people liked a generation earlier; although there are truly banned books, that, for example, cannot be sold on Amazon, and they are usually, but by no means always, more obviously offensive and of more questionable worth.)
What you will not find on banned book lists, with few exceptions, is the books that were used to teach the humanities for hundreds, sometimes even thousands of years, up through the first half of the 20th century. Increasingly, you won't find them in the library, either. They haven't been "banned", though. They're just being "curated" out of collections and pulped. We had to update our library, you see. Human experience is different now, you need to read our modern and ideologically fashionable authors. That's why you have to scroll down to page 14/16 on that list before you find a book published before the year 2000.
Of course, the perception (and maybe truth) is that the reaction against the currently fashionable propaganda literature in school libraries and reading lists is led by illiterates, not by people who think you should be reading Thucydides.
They are not removed from school shelves. This is not even a proposal for them to be removed from school shelves. The title is misleading. Please see my other comment above.
Some State Rep has inquired about these, so is true that it's plausible that some of the books in the list may be targeted in the future, but that hasn't happened yet.
Not in the sense that they are being removed from the school libraries, but that might happen in the future. There are other instances of books being removed from libraries, or removed from the required reading lists, but this isn't one of them.
+ Remove them from their shelves, and send a letter saying they do not have the books available. This is the cheaper/easier option, and several schools have already opted to do so.
+ Make a count of all the books, provide location information about the storage of the book, including its exact geographic location on their campus, and trawl their records to determine precisely how much they spent on each of the books in an itemised manner [0], and send a report detailing all of this.
[0] Schools receive books generally in either donations, or in groupings that are not itemised, making determining the cost of an individual copy of a book extremely difficult. That's before you get to poor financial record keeping that is also rife in school libraries.
That is a possible answer if you would like to invite a full scale audit of the school. For obvious reasons, that is not desirable by administrations. The safer option is to remove the material if you cannot be certain.
The school makes a purchase of new books from a publisher. They select the "modern teen reading" package, and pay a lump sum for 100 books across nine categories. Some of the books under investigation are in the received package. What was the cost of the individual books under investigation?
Ooh, I know this one - if acquired as a non-itemised purchase, the valuation should be the number of books we care about, divided by the total number of books (100 in this case), multiplied by the total lump sum paid.
However, you acquired three identical items. The lump sum changes each time. You are not sure which of five different purchases these items belong to. How do you determine how much was paid?
I agree that there are some complications, but it is a solved problem, with a myriad of off the shelf asset tracking software solutions. It does add a bit of effort to the unpacking of a shipment, but not beyond what's expected of any retailer.
A school, however, is not a retailer. They likely have not done those things in the past, and so the simplest solution for them is to not do this extra work, and remove the offending items from their shelves.
> This is the cheaper/easier option, and several schools have already opted to do so.
Do you have a source reporting that schools are actually removing books in response to this particular inquiry? It seems that they shouldn't be. (I am aware of other instances of books being explicitly removed from school libraries or curricula by the school boards.)
What makes me skeptical is that I'm not sure in what situation physically removing a bunch of books from the shelves would be cheaper/easier than retrieving records about them.
> What makes me skeptical is that I'm not sure in what situation physically removing a bunch of books from the shelves would be cheaper/easier than retrieving records about them.
Schools don't buy individual books. They buy packages. Those packages are not itemised, and the receipts don't list which individual books you received, just the number of titles in what genres. The people sending the packages don't have that information either.
You make a purchase, and get a guarantee of N titles, in X genres. The warehouse pulls down N titles, in X genres, with varying numbers of each individual title, and then sends that out. The individual titles come from the publisher under wholesale costs, so individual purchases aren't tracked.
The exact costs are further complicated by other discounts that may be applied. Seasonal discounts for different genres, some places will give you discounts if you return covers of damaged books (as proof of destruction), etc.
The records requested may literally not exist, and require the school to compare when entries appeared in their tracking system, as compared to when a purchase was made and received, reverse-engineering those costs.
This is a sad farce and all, but the reality is that it doesn't take 850 books to educate a child in the humanities. It shouldn't take more than three:
- 1984 by George Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair) -- what evil looks like
- The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius -- the "theory" of a good life
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig -- the "practice" of a good life
ZAMM can be optionally replaced or supplemented by Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Robert Bach.
That really is a sad farce. I cannot imagine what my life would be like if there were only three books. You might try reading some more -- humanity is really quite fascinating, and your list only covers an extremely narrow slice.
You might have as well written "please continue practicing your recorder flute as an adult, it is really quite fascinating."
At some point you have read the instructive books you needed to read and solidified the principles you want to live by. Anything after that is whimsical personal recreation, raising the question why we waste money forcing children to do it. Because English teachers believe their little hobby deserves a larger audience?
In grade 5, I read my first thousand-page book (Pillars of the Earth), and your reading list would have kept me occupied for less than a month. I note your derision towards both music and literature, and pride in the depth of your ignorance. We are very different people, and that's okay, but schools aren't meant to be tailored precisely to you. They exist for all of the other students, too. Some of which will, yes, grow to be English or Music teachers.
A random selection of humanities books I enjoyed in middle and high school, which you might enjoy and/or learn from:
I welcome your criticism if your concept of music is limited to the recorder and your concept of reading is limited to assigned class reading. Otherwise, what are you even talking about? Precocious children like you can read as much as they want and whatever they want. The point is how much of that reading absolutely must be assigned to them in class and with what purpose.
Let's be honest. What percentage of the general population do you think are aware of those, beyond maybe hearing the names once or twice? 1%? .5%? I'd guess much much less.
Your point earlier was either to say that you are literally uneducated in the humanities and proud of it, or that you do consider yourself well-educated, despite not having even heard of Marcus Aurelius.
I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the latter.
As someone who is well-educated in the humanities, do you believe that most people receive a thorough and effective education? Why did you find it worthwhile to say that Cicero/Ovid/Plutarch are obscure for them?
Alternatively, it is surprising that someone like yourself, with some baseline of a humanities education, has dedicated time to learning about an author of light whimsy ahead of an author of a readable, relevant, extremely thoroughly time-tested, and influential work of moral philosophy. Marcus Aurelius is perhaps the embodiment of the title of philosopher king, and a lot of people would benefit from reading him.
Honestly, all I know about the humanities is what I had to learn in high school. I've spent my life studying the sciences which I think is much more useful than the humanities. The humanities are just people's ideas that cannot be tested like the claims of science can be. I wouldn't say I'm proud to not be as educated in the humanities as some people. I simply don't care. But I am proud to be well-educated in the sciences.
Perfect. Then, since we agree that humanities are less useful than the sciences, and since they are "just people's ideas," we should absolutely minimize the amount of humanities-related reading children are forced into at school. Let's pick a small set of books that illustrate a healthy relationship with life's realities and leave recreational reading to those that want to use their spare time on it.
I don't think your first two are as foundational, as teachable, or as uniquely relevant to students in the present moment in the US as Orwell and Marcus Aurelius.
But note that none of your picks appear on that list of 850 books they're banning in Texas.
Wow. Even if I don't agree with this race/identity thing you guys have going on no books should ever be banned. You can't ban ideas and thoughts. You will only make them more interesting to people if they're banned imho.
There should be no such thing as books that are not allowed to be read. Under any circumstance. Certainly in schools. Students should expand their minds read weird books and discuss them openly.
Just like reading Mine Kampf is not banned in the Netherlands (or Germany).
Stores however are not allowed to sell it (Dutch Government has the rights to the Dutch translation so disallowing reprints is easy). But even then; I can download the PDF on the net without issues. And I can read it. I can even sell an old copy of the book (if I had one) without repercussions.
Please elaborate what annotations you'd think inappropriate for the incoherent ramblings of Adolf Hitler.
Not that you'd ever want to read it. Mussolini famously gave up on finishing it. Even in nazi germany it was always more of a symbol, a book you buy in support of its author and proudly present on your shelf - not read.
It just adds a sidebar that annotates each and every sentence with »Quatsch!«.
But no. The 2015 annotated edition was released by the Institut für Zeigeschichte under critical acclaim. Its annotations are (rough translation mine):
> A critical commentary that deconstructs and contextualizes Hitler's work. How did his assumptions come into being? Which goals was he trying to accomplish by these? Where his claims supported by by his contemporaries in society? Which consequences did his announcements have after 1933? And above all, how can Hitler's myriad of claims, lies, and policy goals be countered by our current understanding?
Though amusingly, in Germany - not really for Mein Kampf - but for other extremist propaganda writings, you are not allowed to keep more than three copies. (Since it's then assumed you're storing them for distribution.)
Not sure how relevant this still is given the Internet.
Germany doesn't have case law unless you get to a constitutional court, and even then it only mandates that the parliament fix it within a generous time frame (and they might ignore half of the things said in the ruling, as with the change to 45b PStG).
I agree in principle but I think you are missing the controversy that’s going on. These topics are being taught irresponsibly with no regard to the neutrality, openness or critical thinking that you seem to be implying. They are being used to indoctrinate. In some parts of the United States, for some topics, schools have stopped being institutions that students can discuss these topics outside of very narrow and one sided perspective. I’m not exaggerating, students get bad marks or aren’t even allowed to challenge ideas.
So, if these schools are unable to teach these materials appropriately, maybe it should be left to other institutions that can. There is real corruption going on and parents are angry about what their kids are being taught. Some schools need to reform how they teach these topics and they are completely unwilling to do so without political pressure.
It's interesting that you say one-sided, because Black, indigenous, lgbtq, AAPI, Latin, women, Jewish, Muslim, disability, etc. rights activists/movements are each independent, and often conflicting. This list seeks to eradicate all of that, in favor of a single, white christian, perspective.
> This list seeks to eradicate all of that, in favor of a single, white christian, perspective.
This is a straw man. Teaching history is important but teaching all history through the lens of oppressor/oppressed is problematic. Many parents' rightly object to ideologically-driven teachings where white children are singled-out and taught that they are oppressors of all other children.
> These topics are being taught irresponsibly with no regard to the neutrality, openness or critical thinking that you seem to be implying. They are being used to indoctrinate. In some parts of the United States, for some topics, schools have stopped being institutions that students can discuss these topics outside of very narrow and one sided perspective. I’m not exaggerating, students get bad marks or aren’t even allowed to challenge ideas.
Ah, yes, so let's leave it up to conservative Texan parents, a group famous for being willing to teach "neutrality, openness, or critical thinking".
Your comment is unproductive and needlessly pejorative.
If you are seriously trying to contribute constructively to the problem I outlined, then I think you must (a) acknowledge there is a problem, and (b) acknowledge these institutions are set up in a way to make reform difficult. (c) Figure out ways to solve it.
What is the recourse to parents who think this is a legitimate problem? They must engage in a political process, which currently involves hyper partisanship. What's going on is crazy. The federal government painted parents as domestic terrorists for their legitimate concerns surrounding schools. We are going to see more of these hyper partisan tactics until we figure out better ways to reform our corrupt institutions.
> There should be no such thing as books that are not allowed to be read.
While Texas State Representative Matt Krause's attempt to limit exposure these books is politically misguided and dangerous, we're not talking about books not being allowed to be read. We're talking about schools not being allowed to have the books in their libraries.
> But even then; I can download the PDF on the net without issues. And I can read it. I can even sell an old copy of the book (if I had one) without repercussions.
Students in Texas could also do all of these things, even if these books were banned from school libraries. If this nonsense goes through, the best way to address it in the short term would be to increase kid's exposure to the list and suggest it as a reading list. Kids are naturally curious about 'banned' things.
All they really even need to do is read the titles of the books in the list and they'll get a good idea of what makes conservatives in TX scared.
I firmly believe that "Mein Kampf" is a must-read book for any civilized person. It is very educational, best read together with Tanya Savicheva's diary [1]
It's unclear whether these books are being banned from being read in schools, or banned from being part of a curriculum.
My opinion is that the books school boards pre-select for students to be part of their curriculum, should be from a carefully selected list of books.
In general, it should not include newly published books, but rather ones that have survived the test of time by remaining relevant over decades/centuries/millenia.
While a nice thought - I think only choosing those that have “remained relevant” over such a long period of time are likely to be those that are problematic… And typically came from one class, gender, and race of people. At least from the books I was seeing…
The notion that only white European Christian rich men have created historic literature and texts is itself an incredibly racist and misogynistic perspective.
If you look at the list, the books being questioned are published within the last 0 to 10 years. Books so new they have not gained scientific or scholarly acceptance or review. Many are likely transient pieces which follow the latest media fashion.
It would be analogous to teaching organic chemistry students with anecdotal papers on Ivermectin. Teach kids the foundational fundamentals, and then let them explore whatever they want on their own as they mature. Feeding them agenda-driven narrative-supporting books is just a mechanism of indoctrination - not education.
It's too educational about the true state of the American system and encourages people to do something bad for the US oligarchs, which in the USA is the ultimate evil.
Unfortunately just like putting "democratic" in your country name - if you have to put "freedom" in your name it's a good sign you are going for anything but.
Remember that the Texas GOP had (has?) the following official policy:
"We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills, critical thinking skills and similar programs..."
So I'm not surprised that they oppose anything to do with a decent education, like a different point of view, but have no problem promoting a book that encourages slavery, rape, genocide, and misogyny.
Was there a book-burning you meant to link to? Because I just read an article about the exercise of free speech, wherein the twitterati criticized the words of a famous author. What "due process“ do you imagine the government requiring of critical writing?
None of which amounts to state actively banning these books. Even though I don't agree, dropping from reading list isn't exactly same as government removing it from the school library. In the sense, it's not the exact same thing.
I have never understood why anyone thinks the left burns books.
The last time I remember people prominently burning books in mainstream conciousness was the Nazis, including irreplacable knowledge like the IfS library by Magnus Hirschfeld.
The notion is so widespread among the right, Dave Rubin named his entire book after it. I have not seen anyone actually try to burn it, even though it is barely worth the paper it is printed on in my humble opinion (and the opinion of most critics).
Sorry, I didn't want to devolve this into a history discussion. I invoked the Nazis not as an example of right wingers, but at the last prominently known book burning during which irreplacable knowledge was lost. Hitler, Stalin and Mao are obviously bad representatives for most (unfortunately not all) of the political spectrum today.
Unless you want to include edgy atheists burning holy books, but that is provocation and not an attempt at censorship.
They are not primarily left. They are authoritarians foremost which use the names of Marx (very much not authoritarian) and Lenin (somewhat authoritarian) concatenated as Marxism-Leninism to justify very much authoritarian systems.
The issue is really that left and right as politial stances are not based on a stable framework, and everyone can place every political system into either category if they really want to (as often happens when people claim the nazis were left wing because they used the word "socialism").
What's actually important is that none of the above fit well within contemporary US-centric understandings of "left" and "right". I say US-centric because some people center-left in the US would be considered center-right where I live - this is how fragile this dicotomy is.
I flagged this because the linked PDF does not support the claim in the title. I think it would be more appropriate to link to an article that supports the claim.
Headline is misleading, and should be corrected. Not being American I went to look for the context, and the issue is about selection of books for educational system. Not about banning. Whether it is a successful way to shape better students is a interesting question to discuss. But fact is that all taxpayer-funded education all over the world includes selection of books for pupils.
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] threadThis is a list of books which a member of Texas House of Representatives (Matt Krause) has inquired about from the Texas Education Agency (supposedly at least in part with respect to Texas's version of the "no critical race theory in schools" laws).
He’s not just casually inquiring the Texas Education Agency, he’s burdening school districts on this wild goose chase which is most likely a political stunt in his campaign for Texas Attorney General.
Quote from the article you linked. I can’t imagine how much time it would take to track this information down for all 850 books on his list, and how these resources would be better spent on actual useful tasks for the school districts.
“Krause informs districts they must provide the committee with the number of copies they have of each book, on what part of campus those books are located and how much money schools spent on the books, as well as information on any other book that violates House Bill 3979, the so-called “critical race theory law”designed to limit how race-related subjects are taught in public schools.”
What you will not find on banned book lists, with few exceptions, is the books that were used to teach the humanities for hundreds, sometimes even thousands of years, up through the first half of the 20th century. Increasingly, you won't find them in the library, either. They haven't been "banned", though. They're just being "curated" out of collections and pulped. We had to update our library, you see. Human experience is different now, you need to read our modern and ideologically fashionable authors. That's why you have to scroll down to page 14/16 on that list before you find a book published before the year 2000.
Of course, the perception (and maybe truth) is that the reaction against the currently fashionable propaganda literature in school libraries and reading lists is led by illiterates, not by people who think you should be reading Thucydides.
I also changed the title to the article's HTML doc title, in case anyone wonders.
Some State Rep has inquired about these, so is true that it's plausible that some of the books in the list may be targeted in the future, but that hasn't happened yet.
It's quite literally a list of targeted books.
Link to the inquiry: https://static.texastribune.org/media/files/965725d7f01b8a25...
EDIT: I learned of one instance of books already being "temporarily" removed by a school board [1] triggered by this inquiry.
[1]: https://www.granburyisd.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&Dom...
+ Remove them from their shelves, and send a letter saying they do not have the books available. This is the cheaper/easier option, and several schools have already opted to do so.
+ Make a count of all the books, provide location information about the storage of the book, including its exact geographic location on their campus, and trawl their records to determine precisely how much they spent on each of the books in an itemised manner [0], and send a report detailing all of this.
[0] Schools receive books generally in either donations, or in groupings that are not itemised, making determining the cost of an individual copy of a book extremely difficult. That's before you get to poor financial record keeping that is also rife in school libraries.
Do you have a source reporting that schools are actually removing books in response to this particular inquiry? It seems that they shouldn't be. (I am aware of other instances of books being explicitly removed from school libraries or curricula by the school boards.)
What makes me skeptical is that I'm not sure in what situation physically removing a bunch of books from the shelves would be cheaper/easier than retrieving records about them.
Schools don't buy individual books. They buy packages. Those packages are not itemised, and the receipts don't list which individual books you received, just the number of titles in what genres. The people sending the packages don't have that information either.
You make a purchase, and get a guarantee of N titles, in X genres. The warehouse pulls down N titles, in X genres, with varying numbers of each individual title, and then sends that out. The individual titles come from the publisher under wholesale costs, so individual purchases aren't tracked.
The exact costs are further complicated by other discounts that may be applied. Seasonal discounts for different genres, some places will give you discounts if you return covers of damaged books (as proof of destruction), etc.
The records requested may literally not exist, and require the school to compare when entries appeared in their tracking system, as compared to when a purchase was made and received, reverse-engineering those costs.
I found an example of what you were referring to though (thanks to @shankr linking to a relevant Twitter thread). [1]
[1]: https://www.granburyisd.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&Dom...
- 1984 by George Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair) -- what evil looks like
- The Meditations by Marcus Aurelius -- the "theory" of a good life
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig -- the "practice" of a good life
ZAMM can be optionally replaced or supplemented by Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Robert Bach.
At some point you have read the instructive books you needed to read and solidified the principles you want to live by. Anything after that is whimsical personal recreation, raising the question why we waste money forcing children to do it. Because English teachers believe their little hobby deserves a larger audience?
A random selection of humanities books I enjoyed in middle and high school, which you might enjoy and/or learn from:
Guns, Germs and Steel
The Art of War
A People's History of the United States
The Prince
Catch-22
Like, it raises questions of what other classical monuments you are unaware of. Cicero? Ovid? Plutarch?
I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the latter.
As someone who is well-educated in the humanities, do you believe that most people receive a thorough and effective education? Why did you find it worthwhile to say that Cicero/Ovid/Plutarch are obscure for them?
Alternatively, it is surprising that someone like yourself, with some baseline of a humanities education, has dedicated time to learning about an author of light whimsy ahead of an author of a readable, relevant, extremely thoroughly time-tested, and influential work of moral philosophy. Marcus Aurelius is perhaps the embodiment of the title of philosopher king, and a lot of people would benefit from reading him.
Capitalism and Slavery by Eric Williams - what evil really looks like
Hayy ibn Yaqdhan by Ibn Tufail - the "theory" of a good life
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou - the "practice" of a good life
I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings can be optionally replaced by Man's Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl
But note that none of your picks appear on that list of 850 books they're banning in Texas.
I believe it makes sense for them to be banned from being mandatory, but school libraries should still be able to carry them.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/12/20/texas-library-books/
I totally agree with you!
Just like reading Mine Kampf is not banned in the Netherlands (or Germany). Stores however are not allowed to sell it (Dutch Government has the rights to the Dutch translation so disallowing reprints is easy). But even then; I can download the PDF on the net without issues. And I can read it. I can even sell an old copy of the book (if I had one) without repercussions.
Not that you'd ever want to read it. Mussolini famously gave up on finishing it. Even in nazi germany it was always more of a symbol, a book you buy in support of its author and proudly present on your shelf - not read.
But no. The 2015 annotated edition was released by the Institut für Zeigeschichte under critical acclaim. Its annotations are (rough translation mine):
> A critical commentary that deconstructs and contextualizes Hitler's work. How did his assumptions come into being? Which goals was he trying to accomplish by these? Where his claims supported by by his contemporaries in society? Which consequences did his announcements have after 1933? And above all, how can Hitler's myriad of claims, lies, and policy goals be countered by our current understanding?
https://www.ifz-muenchen.de/mein-kampf/
Not sure how relevant this still is given the Internet.
So, if these schools are unable to teach these materials appropriately, maybe it should be left to other institutions that can. There is real corruption going on and parents are angry about what their kids are being taught. Some schools need to reform how they teach these topics and they are completely unwilling to do so without political pressure.
This is a straw man. Teaching history is important but teaching all history through the lens of oppressor/oppressed is problematic. Many parents' rightly object to ideologically-driven teachings where white children are singled-out and taught that they are oppressors of all other children.
Ah, yes, so let's leave it up to conservative Texan parents, a group famous for being willing to teach "neutrality, openness, or critical thinking".
If you are seriously trying to contribute constructively to the problem I outlined, then I think you must (a) acknowledge there is a problem, and (b) acknowledge these institutions are set up in a way to make reform difficult. (c) Figure out ways to solve it.
What is the recourse to parents who think this is a legitimate problem? They must engage in a political process, which currently involves hyper partisanship. What's going on is crazy. The federal government painted parents as domestic terrorists for their legitimate concerns surrounding schools. We are going to see more of these hyper partisan tactics until we figure out better ways to reform our corrupt institutions.
Let's not forget both sides are not impervious to racist behaviors. "White liberals dumb themselves down when they speak to black people, a new study contends." https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/11/30/white-liber...
What recourse should parents have when they're upset that their children are being taught to be better people than they are, and don't like it?
> Let's not forget both sides are not impervious to racist behaviors.
What is the relevance of this at all?
> What is the relevance of this at all?
You brought it up.
So some obscene book (think the worst parts of pornhub coupled with the worst parts of erotic fanfiction) should be in primary schools?
While Texas State Representative Matt Krause's attempt to limit exposure these books is politically misguided and dangerous, we're not talking about books not being allowed to be read. We're talking about schools not being allowed to have the books in their libraries.
> But even then; I can download the PDF on the net without issues. And I can read it. I can even sell an old copy of the book (if I had one) without repercussions.
Students in Texas could also do all of these things, even if these books were banned from school libraries. If this nonsense goes through, the best way to address it in the short term would be to increase kid's exposure to the list and suggest it as a reading list. Kids are naturally curious about 'banned' things. All they really even need to do is read the titles of the books in the list and they'll get a good idea of what makes conservatives in TX scared.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanya_Savicheva
My opinion is that the books school boards pre-select for students to be part of their curriculum, should be from a carefully selected list of books.
In general, it should not include newly published books, but rather ones that have survived the test of time by remaining relevant over decades/centuries/millenia.
If you look at the list, the books being questioned are published within the last 0 to 10 years. Books so new they have not gained scientific or scholarly acceptance or review. Many are likely transient pieces which follow the latest media fashion.
It would be analogous to teaching organic chemistry students with anecdotal papers on Ivermectin. Teach kids the foundational fundamentals, and then let them explore whatever they want on their own as they mature. Feeding them agenda-driven narrative-supporting books is just a mechanism of indoctrination - not education.
Unfortunately just like putting "democratic" in your country name - if you have to put "freedom" in your name it's a good sign you are going for anything but.
"We oppose the teaching of Higher Order Thinking Skills, critical thinking skills and similar programs..."
So I'm not surprised that they oppose anything to do with a decent education, like a different point of view, but have no problem promoting a book that encourages slavery, rape, genocide, and misogyny.
Reference: http://s3.amazonaws.com/texasgop_pre/assets/original/2012Pla...
In the sense of removing books from bookstores, Amazon did ban a broad category of books. [2]
In the sense of literally burning books, I'm don't know of any recent instances in the US by either side. But I know of one example in Canada. [3]
[1]: https://www.newsweek.com/schools-drop-kill-mockingbird-requi...
[2]: WSJ: "Amazon Won’t Sell Books Framing LGBTQ+ Identities as Mental Illnesses" https://archive.fo/v5rWn
[3]: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/book-burning-at-ontario...
On the other hand, this happened https://twitter.com/cjtackett/status/1486788612511383553
[1]: https://www.granburyisd.org/site/default.aspx?PageType=3&Dom...
The last time I remember people prominently burning books in mainstream conciousness was the Nazis, including irreplacable knowledge like the IfS library by Magnus Hirschfeld.
The notion is so widespread among the right, Dave Rubin named his entire book after it. I have not seen anyone actually try to burn it, even though it is barely worth the paper it is printed on in my humble opinion (and the opinion of most critics).
Unless you want to include edgy atheists burning holy books, but that is provocation and not an attempt at censorship.
What's actually important is that none of the above fit well within contemporary US-centric understandings of "left" and "right". I say US-centric because some people center-left in the US would be considered center-right where I live - this is how fragile this dicotomy is.
From my outside the us perspective, both sides look psychotic right now. Or maybe psychopatic? Or both?
"Women's rights - Justin Karr
Neil Gaiman's reaction on Twitter sums it up nicely:
> There's only one kind of people who would vote to ban Maus, whatever they are calling themselves these days.²
1: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jan/27/tennessee-scho...
2: https://twitter.com/neilhimself/status/1486473393075802112