No, it isn't. There are millions of books that aren't in school libraries. Are they all de facto banned?
Confidently declaring something doesn't make it true. A library deciding not to carry a book is not a book ban.
Never having a book, having it but having it be removed for non-content-related reasons, having it removed for content-related reasons, having the content removal decision come from librarians, or parents, or politicians, the public record of comments about why something is removed, all of these things are obviously important. Flattening it to "yeah lots of books aren't in libraries" is a _bit_ reductive!
Good things are good, bad things are bad. Sometimes it's hard to write laws that work around this, but at the very least moral judgements can be made, with space for nuance.
There’s a big difference between saying “we don’t think Tropic of Cancer is appropriate for high school kids so we’re going to remove it” and “Tropic of Cancer is banned in our schools”.
The “book bans” happening are mostly the former and while I do think they’re mostly stupid, they’re nowhere near what you’d think is happening from headlines. Very little actual banning is occurring.
There’s surely a more accurate term than banning or curation here.
You can see it for yourself.
https://archive.org/details/gender-queer-a-memoir-by-maia-ko...
This is apparently what it would be censorship to keep out of gradeschool libraries. If you're ok with the book, then I guess there's not much more to talk about. If you're now not ok with the book, then I guess this is the first time you actually saw inside of it.
We're told that there is a difference between doctrine and curation, and maybe in some theoretical world this is true. But in the world we actually live in, doctrine's already being pushed... they're just pretending that they're "merely curating". And they're demanding that the other side not be allowed any oversight on that curation. When they curate, good, when anyone else does it, well... they're the "bad guys".
Personally, I could not care less. If you want this book in schools, it does not affect me. But you should know what book it is we're talking about. Take a look, click the link.
Obviously they pick some books and not others for some reasons. If you like their reasons you call it curation, if you don’t like their reasons you call it banning.
Randomly selecting books for rotation would bias by sheer publication volume. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my local library to be 40% Atkins Diet by volume, regardless of how positive I might feel about it.
This is not a "gotcha" or loophole of some type. Words have meanings[1]. If your argument relies on changing the meaning of a common word in the dictionary, it's your argument that is wrong, not the damn dictionary!
I mean, where are you going with this?
Are you seriously advocating that school libraries and librarians have free reign to determine which books to hold? Because that's how you get Intelligent Design introduced into schools. It's how you perpetuate stereotypes and bigotry.[2].
We don't want individuals exclusively responsible for determining what ideas may or may not be available to people. By having the ruling authority perform the determination, it becomes a collective determination by the taxpayers.
If the taxpayers are unhappy, they express their unhappiness with their vote.
I want to know, after reading your many emotionally charged arguments for why this must be called a "ban", exactly why you feel that the decision on literature suitability be made by selected individuals, and not by a voted-in government.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ban
[2] I've been atheist for decades, and I argued multiple times against allowing individuals within schools to determine what goes into the minds of children, because I've seen multiple times that the only end-result of allowing this is that the more passionate (engaged? Ideologues? Insane?) people tend to move into those positions that allow them to propagate their ideology.
Maybe you wouldn't, but be honest with yourself - how many parents want their school to hold and keep pornographic material?
If you want to show your kids sexually graphic images, then sure, fine, have at it. You're complaining that you can't show these images to other people's kids, and you're complaining that those parents are a problem?
And moreso, you can't see it from someone else's perspective who might have a problem with this?
Do you have children?
It doesn’t matter whether I or anyone else has a problem with it. What matters is whether adolescents have a right to read it, which they do. I exercised that right as a student, and I would like other students to be able to do the same.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie%27s_Choice_(novel)
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_According_to_Garp
Click it. See for yourself.
> What matters is whether adolescents have a right to read it, w
They don't have any such right, best that I can understand the legal framework of the western world.
For instance, they don't have the right to have sex with adults. Anyone who claimed that they were being denied such a right, well... do we really need to spell out how those claimants would be treated?
Minors are permitted by responsible adults to read age-appropriate books. We don't say that refusing to put The Anarchist Cookbook up in 4th grade libraries is censorship. At least non-lunatics don't. There are books that they will be allowed to read once legal adults, but that reading earlier might have adverse developmental effects. It's generally agreed that actual pornography is one such category.
I do think it's important to think about the fact that school libraries are where kids tend to access a lot of books (there are of course city libraries, but those places are also being targeted). At least my experience was around that. And many libraries will have a request system, so if a kid is like "I want to read this", then libraries are able to often put in a purchase order, and then make that available for other students.
At least based on my own school experiences, I do think that teachers of a certain ... authoritarian bent would be more than happy to make up a stink of books brought in that would be "banned" from the library if a copy circulating were brought to their attention. Power structures in schools are like that. But that's just conjecture.
I think the general point of the "book ban" terminology is that librarians and schools generally had leeway to bring in more or less anything to the library, and that autonomy is being stripped away for very dark reasons. This is the age of the internet, but from my own childhood, if my school and city library suddenly decided to not provide certain kinds of book, I would just not have access to that at all.
All that to say that you're right on the word in some sense, but it feels fitting to me.
It's now in the public domain, so one could even set up a little publishing company and publish it oneself.
And it's an incredibly awful book, measured to all the 'fame' it holds in certain circles.
For me it was a playboy at 13, for my friends probably the same, but I'm sure the internet bring the age lower,and pack more actions.
When I think about your link of a graphic novel and the first playboy I read, I'm pretty sure any parent would prefer the graphic novel where a poorly done 2 image strip depicts a fellation, and the text besides is... Less than erotic let's say.
And btw: i read 'when I was 5 I killed myself' from Buten at around the same age (maybe 14), as well as flowers for algernon and 1984, I don't think they are age-appropriate books, but they are worth reading when adolescent, because you experience them harder, and formative.
Buten in particular wrote hard books.
Restrictions come in many forms. It used to be marriage is special, then WC symbols are sacred, now we're back to think-of-the-children and their precious little minds. And one particular form is that some books are now banned from school libraries.
I wholeheartedly support the demand for more correct wording, but unfortunately it doesn't really matter.
Maybe. Maybe the "reactionary attempt" would have been non-existent if the advocates weren't using sexually graphic material, as linked in the thread above.
Do you also think that teaching of sex ed should include videos from pornhub?
I did. Please don’t call people liars.
It’s a graphic novel depicting a sex act, albeit not particularly erotically.
The entire point of my other comments was that I checked out other books in high school, books that are widely considered excellent and have been for decades, that contained far more explicit “inappropriate” content. The only things different here are the facts that it’s (1) drawn, and (2) concerns LGBTQ identity.
> They don't have any such right, best that I can understand the legal framework of the western world.
We live under a negative legal scheme, not a positive one. I’m not aware of any law that says that children cannot read what they’d like to read, either federal or state.
Obscenity in the US has a distinct legal test[1], one that you and I both understand this book (and Sophie’s Choice) would pass easily. It also doesn’t mention children anywhere.
Finally: nobody in this thread wants children to be hurt, or to be exposed to things that will hurt them. But books, especially ones that are presented and explainable within an educational context, do not hurt children. If anything, adults tend to hurt themselves and others more based on books than children do.
We're also not talking about pornography. None of the material here fails the Miller test.
Nobody is talking about pornography; not everything that contains sex or violence is pornographic in nature (much less obscene).
In general it seems completely okay to include the discussion of porn in sex ed, and thus to show actual porn in sex ed.
It might make sense show it separately to boys and girls, mostly because boys are behind in development (on average), so the discussion of it should be different, but also because of the expected questions, etc.
There are many reasons to have no copies of a book, with the simplest being that nobody has requested it yet. Framing that as “banning” is ridiculous, since it falsely implies a doctrinal intent where only ignorance or concern for stated demands exists.
What you said is not curation, it's just managing the stock. Having 57 copies or 56 copies does not substantially alter availavbility. If somebody removed all copies of Atkins books, because "nobody needs them anymore" - then yes, this would be a doctrinal decision. Admittedly, since diets (for some reason) aren't part of culture wars (yet?), not a very controversial or scandalous one, but if some Atkins die-hards occupied a political position, or, in the contrary, Atkins were declared racist for some reason, it could become one.
> There are many reasons to have no copies of a book, with the simplest being that nobody has requested it yet
But how I can "request" a book that isn't in the library? Most libraries I've used do not have this function, not at least any that I could locate as a regular patron. On the contrary, I am reasonably sure most of the books featured on my local library's home page, aren't there because some patron came to them and asked for this specific book, which previously wasn't part of the collection and wouldn't be unless specifically requested (in fact, again, I know no way of doing this). Looking at their published collection developing policy I see (among others):
Provide a diverse and inclusive collection that contains content by and about a wide array of people and cultures
Consider the appropriateness to scope of the collection as it is developed
Content created by and representative of marginalized and underrepresented groups
Attention of critics, reviewers, awards and public
Suitability for intended audience
Literary or stylistic quality
Tell me these are non-doctrinal criteria. Of course they are - one's high quality suitable inclusive book is another's offensive bigoted trash. Again, it's about who has the power to make such decisions. Of course, the librarians, seeing themselves as The Experts (TM) would claim exclusive right to make such decisions on behalf of people paying for their library. But are they entitled to that, absent any control and supervision?
The people complaining about banning are being either intentionally alarmist (if they understand what’s going on) or knee-jerk reactionary. It’s the exact same as when the religious people are mad the state mandates we teach evolution.
School districts and states have to select what kids learn, since we have finite time and resources to reach them, in the same way that libraries have to choose which books occupy finite shelf space.
I don’t agree with a lot of the decisions, but people are acting like it’s some right wing fascism every time they remove Henry Miller a library.