Important to note that "banned" here means "a school chose not to have this book in their library".
It's an annoying abuse of language. "Banned Books" has historically meant people are getting arrested for possessing the books or stores are being prevented from selling it or publishers are being prevented from producing it.
This is essentially a clickbait title for "People disagree about what is age-appropriate content for a public school to provide to children".
While true, that is the same reasoning when people said that it isn't censorship if government isn't one actor involved or it isn't censorship if you just de-platform people.
It fails to grasp the core issue, where some people have the ambition to act as a barrier to information. The implementation is secondary. You are correct that a school library is a very poor case or an invalid one of course. The general tendency for more censorship is probably real though. I wouldn't expect a Guardian article if the books were associated with different political leaning though.
If I 'choose not to let you post on my website' would you consider this a ban? This reads like a really dishonest shifting of the goalpost for what is effectively censorship of literature. And, if you look at some of the books that were "chose not to have this book in their library" it overwhelmingly focuses on books that feature queer characters, or discuss these themes. Any honest observer knows exactly what is going on here, and as others have noted, this was not limited to school libraries.
Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail, or White Identity by Jared Taylor, never make these banned book lists. They don't have to be "banned" - libraries simply make them unavailable, so they get to control information, without being the kind of horrible people that would censor or ban a book. How virtuous!
Do you know who needs to start banning "books"? Amazon. They truly need to start finding a way to ban bullshit books and lousy books printed on demand --it's a racket and they just don't seem to care.
Can they not hire some people to curate titles to ensure they are legit and anyone doing a bait and switch gets banned from the site altogether. It's not like they can't ID bad actors.
My sole comment is that people who use verbiage like this are mentally ill. Not "mentally ill" like I'm calling them an epithet. But like, actually mentally ill.
There are things that are simply not pedagogically useful in the limited instructional period in school. There are things that are simply not appropriate during early childhood development.
People who abuse and manipulate language like this are exactly why more traditional instruction is desired in certain school districts. Postmodernism is wrong. There are actually things that are true without the miasma of an artificial (and exhausting) social construction of reality.
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 35.9 ms ] threadIt's an annoying abuse of language. "Banned Books" has historically meant people are getting arrested for possessing the books or stores are being prevented from selling it or publishers are being prevented from producing it.
This is essentially a clickbait title for "People disagree about what is age-appropriate content for a public school to provide to children".
I remember one time some libraries banned non-equity-promoting books and then backtracked and called it "deaccession" https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/peel-school-board-lib...
Right wing and left wing people love roleplaying as freedom fighters against the forces of evil.
It fails to grasp the core issue, where some people have the ambition to act as a barrier to information. The implementation is secondary. You are correct that a school library is a very poor case or an invalid one of course. The general tendency for more censorship is probably real though. I wouldn't expect a Guardian article if the books were associated with different political leaning though.
Can they not hire some people to curate titles to ensure they are legit and anyone doing a bait and switch gets banned from the site altogether. It's not like they can't ID bad actors.
There are things that are simply not pedagogically useful in the limited instructional period in school. There are things that are simply not appropriate during early childhood development.
People who abuse and manipulate language like this are exactly why more traditional instruction is desired in certain school districts. Postmodernism is wrong. There are actually things that are true without the miasma of an artificial (and exhausting) social construction of reality.