20 ms·

As calls to ban books intensify, digital librarians offer perspective

190 points by sohkamyung 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pmontra 5y ago
> material that may cause discomfort to readers. The world is going to discomfort them more often than not so they better train also by reading all kind of books or competitors (in the broadest possible meaning) will eat them alive while they rest inside a comfortable bubble.
- ajsnigrutin 5y ago
  Unless they scream loud enough, and the world adapts to a few idiots. eg: jazz hands instead of clapping
  - pmontra 5y ago
    I didn't know about jazz hands https://abcnews.go.com/International/universitys-move-replace-clapping-jazz-hands-sparks-controversy/story?id=58254353 https://abcnews.go.com/International/universitys-move-replac... (2018) Did they actually adopt the rule nationwide or was it discarded?
sequel_database 5y ago
There's a wide gap between banning a book and using it as curriculum. Find a happy medium.
analyte123 5y ago
Not going to hold my breath for Archive.org or the ALA's "curated collection" of books banned from Amazon.
- kspacewalk2 5y ago
  "Books whose authors are no longer able to give a talk on college campuses without multiple threats of physical violence against them". Curated, of course.
  - shlurpy 5y ago
    So any LGBT authors and any femenists?
    - phone8675309 5y ago
      Sure, but to be fair, it's a pretty broad category these days, and not limited to just those categories.
    - kspacewalk2 5y ago
      No, I don't think so. If you meant to use those as examples, please tell me who are these LGBT and feminist authors who cannot freely give talks at American campuses these days? Other than, you know, team TERF.
- zorpner 5y ago
  In case anyone else was confused about the multiple comments on this post talking about "books banned from Amazon", it's about Amazon choosing not to sell books that characterize gender identities and sexual orientation as mental illness.
temp8964 5y ago
No. Select books for K-12 curriculum or school libraries is far far away from banning books. Please stop the fear-mongering.
- gambiting 5y ago
  I don't know where you grew up, but our school library had lots and lots and lots of books that had nothing to do with the curriculum, and students were encouraged to read outside of the required material. The idea that certain books(or indeed, entire categories of books) should be banned from a school library is definitely censorship. It's like suggesting that school computers should be banned from viewing certain pages on wikipedia, on actually, in fact, providing students with copies of paper encyclopedias with pages torn out - it's the removal of knowledge that is the hallmark of censorship.
  - temp8964 5y ago
    How about school computers should be banned from viewing certain websites?
    - gjsman-1000 5y ago
      They already are, and it is legally required that they do so, as are libraries. https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/childrens-internet-protection-act https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/childrens-internet-prot...
    - gambiting 5y ago
      Websites are not books though and cannot be treated the same way. I see a library more like a giant encyclopedia of knowledge, you should be free to access it if you need to, without books being banned for political reasons or otherwise. Now, I do support having a kind of a "restricted section" where you can access a book normally out of sight. Say a copy of Kamasutra - it's not on a shelf, but if you need it for a project and got a permission from a teacher - go ahead.
    - ivanche 5y ago
gjsman-1000 5y ago
Nobody’s calling for banning books. They are calling for not using certain books in curriculum, which is very different and not allowing certain books is necessary for any school system. I wouldn’t want my kid to write “A kid’s version of Algebra” and then have it used in schools. I wouldn’t want a flat-earther to have his Science book in schools. Who wants Trump’s guide to Civics? That’s super different than “banning books” like it’s 1940s Germany or something. EDIT: Some are saying that this would also apply to the school library. This, in my view, doesn’t negate the schools need to discriminate between content in the least. I would not want a flat earther science book in the curriculum or in the library.
- bwb 5y ago
  I guess it depends a little on who is making the choices. If it is politician driven, might be fair to call it banning. If it is the school system and teachers making a choice about what to use to teach effectively that seems like good policy.
  - LocalH 5y ago
    If they're public schools, the funding is governmental (state-based in the US), and thus there could be an argument made that it is still "banning". In private schools, not so much (but then again, pretty sure private schools can already control their curriculum and the books available to students from the library).
  - bequanna 5y ago
    I think you have that backwards. Parents and the community should have the final say when deciding what is included in a curriculum, not (potentially activist) teachers and school boards.
    - quadrifoliate 5y ago
      > Parents and the community should have the final say ...not (potentially activist) teachers and school boards. Aren't school boards usually elected by the community? Also, generally, a lot of public school teaching is about encouraging a newer generation to think for themselves, and potentially be exposed to ideas that are not constrained by the parents and the community. Parents who want to micromanage what ideas their kid is exposed to should consider homeschooling.
quadrifoliate 5y ago
A lot of the other comments on here are saying that this is banning books from curricula [1]. But I would...like to see the sources for this assertion? All of the stories I have seen [1][2] say that the books are banned from the school library system. As far as I am aware, school libraries usually contain a wide range of books, not just whatever is required for the curriculum. So banning a book from a school library does seem to be a fairly strong suppression of ideas. Libraries have usually been the place where you go to find ideas outside the safe circle of whatever is permitted by your (usually insipid) curriculum. For example, I am not a fan of Ayn Rand's philosophy, but I am still glad I got to read her books from my school library, so I could make that decision for myself. School libraries curated by legislators with an agenda seem like a Really Bad Idea. ---------------------------------------- [1] This would be within limits, I guess, but still weird. Wouldn't you just use a different curriculum? [2] https://www.npr.org/2021/10/28/1050013664/texas-lawmaker-matt-krause-launches-inquiry-into-850-books https://www.npr.org/2021/10/28/1050013664/texas-lawmaker-mat... [3] https://www.kmuw.org/education/2021-11-09/goddard-school-district-orders-29-books-removed-from-circulation https://www.kmuw.org/education/2021-11-09/goddard-school-dis...
- lr4444lr 5y ago
  The books being on the school library or on classroom shelves connotes that the educational custodians of our children, who have literal and legal responsibility for their safety and well being on multiple levels, have approved them. Not so much to promote every idea they contain, but at least that they express things in a way that is psychologically appropriate for kids at their level of development. What kinds of ideas cross this line of appropriateness you or I may disagree on, but the point is that it exists in a school setting, which the article seems to pretty much miss altogether.
  - TechnoTimeStop 5y ago
    Yeah cause Harry Potter should be banned because the Trans-bully-train.... LMFAO
  - wolverine876 5y ago
mherdeg 5y ago
Were any of the recently withdrawn-by-publisher Seuss books, like "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street", widely removed from school libraries? Or is this a purely "Beloved" phenomenon? The closest I could find about coverage on this was an article saying that some libraries reclassified the Seuss books as "reference" to prohibit checkouts because they were being stolen (e.g. https://oxfordobserver.org/5172/community/dr-seuss-enterprises-pulls-six-books-for-harmful-images/ https://oxfordobserver.org/5172/community/dr-seuss-enterpris...).
temp8964 5y ago
Stop confusing K-12 public school libraries with public libraries. K-12 public school libraries always have a small selection of books. Vast majority of books are not in K-12 public school libraries. There is no parallel between select books for K-12 public school libraries and banning books from libraries. If this is about you want to indoctrinate certain ideology into kids using the public school system, at least be honest about it. Stop pretending this is about banning books. Stop using the K-12 public school libraries or the public school system as the battle ground for spreading radical political ideologies. Our public school system is already bad enough.
- xphilter 5y ago
  Which radical political ideologies?
  - Wistar 5y ago
    Those that espouse unrestricted access to knowledge.
    - temp8964 5y ago
      This might be a valid idea for academic research, not for K-12 learning. It's not even worth arguing.
      - klyrs 5y ago
        In this case, the state wants to decide what sexualities that children are allowed to be exposed to. Is that a can of worms that you really want opened? If the left demanded a ban on books that contain positive depictions of heterosexual romance (for example, A Wrinkle in Time would be banned because of the pornographic, dare I say pedophilic, kiss shared between boy and girl) would you be making the same argument?
      - xphilter 5y ago
        So which ideas are you okay with banning? Are you the person who gets to decide? If not, then who does?
derbOac 5y ago
Anyone know where there's data on challenges over time? I could only find these two things: https://www.ala.org/advocacy/sites/ala.org.advocacy/files/content/banned/frequentlychallenged/challengesbytype/2010challengesbyyearv3.png https://www.ala.org/advocacy/sites/ala.org.advocacy/files/co... https://bookriot.com/statistics-of-censorship/ https://bookriot.com/statistics-of-censorship/ I have a feeling something more comprehensive and precise is out there but I don't know where to look. The ALA has a "field report" but they charge for it and I'm not even sure if it would have the content I'm looking for. Most of the data I can find is on the most frequently challenged books, and the reasons for doing so.
gjsman-1000 5y ago
[flagged]
- azeirah 5y ago
  As far as I know most libraries (school libraries too probably?) are open to book requests. Unless you're asking for something like mein kampf, I don't think the librarians will look at you weirdly when asking for _any_ book whatsoever.
  - belorn 5y ago
    I would assume that if someone asked a librarian for Mein Kampf, the assumption is that the student is interested in history. Similar, a student reading the Communist Manifesto is most likely not a revolutionary that want to draw inspiration for an violent insurrection, but rather a philosophy/history student that is interested to read the original text. Naturally context matter. If the student is wearing a beret and holding a AK4, maybe denying the Communist Manifesto would be the right decision at that point in time.
    - jjj123 5y ago
      In your last example I think only the gun is the problem. Even if the kid started a club for socialists and wanted to read the communist manifesto as part of their book club that should be allowed.
    - hulitu 5y ago
      I strongly dissagree, except maybe in the case you believe in reincarnation or that your life has no meaning anymore. If the student is wearing a beret and holding a AK4 the best thing to do is giving him the book.
  - the_only_law 5y ago
    Hell, when I was in HS there was a copy of Mein Kampf sitting on a display stand. This was not that long ago either.
  - 5y ago
balozi 5y ago
We're not the censor, you're the censor. This book banning thing is the new manufacturing of an old moral panic.
gjsman-1000 5y ago
For everyone arguing about how the library system is being censored with this, I would like to remind people that since 2000, all libraries (including non-school libraries) have the internet censored with (almost always) Google SafeSearch locked on and many websites (particularly porn but there are others) blocked. And it's federal law. https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/childrens-internet-protection-act https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/childrens-internet-prot... Is this censorship? And if so, what is the difference between internet censorship and library censorship, other than that someone printed their work instead of typing it? And why is outrage permitted for this and blocking printed books, but not for digital work?
- colpabar 5y ago
  The difference is that you can't accidentally click a popup that takes you to a porn website in a book. If you want to talk about specific things that are blocked by that safe filter that you think shouldn't be, that could be a discussion worth having. But anyone who has ever used the internet should know that you absolutely need some kind of filter on a school's internet connection. When I was in school, the only things online that I wanted to access that were blocked were flash games.
- quadrifoliate 5y ago
  The difference is that librarians already provide a "SafeSearch" by curating material at libraries. This is more similar to if Texas tried to mandate that Google SafeSearch at libraries should now include a ban on any LGBTQ images. Contrary to what you might imagine, checking out and shelving books is not the only things librarians do – they also curate and trim material, a bit like cultivating a garden. Libraries are a fine-tuned system that maximizes freedom of expression and ideas in a reasonably curated manner. It existed long before the Internet, and legislators tampering with that is always alarming.
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    Would the legislators intervening be permissible in your view if the legislators believe that the librarians are doing a poor job at curation? An example of this is the right's claim that many of these banned books are almost pornographic in nature and inappropriate for almost any age. From the right's perspective, the legislators are intervening because the librarians are failing at their curation and safety job.
gidam 5y ago
It's a classic autoritarian and conservative plot. Knowledge is power, and they are fcking scared of it.
- hiram112 5y ago
  Love how the left is now framing this as some sort of authoritarian Fascist plot of the right, when they themselves have created the cancel culture we're now drowning in. Seems to me that the right is simply trying to curate books that are pushed on impressionable children and young adults, who are FORCED to attend public schools, paid for by taxpayers who are FORCED to fund them. I have not seen a single instance of conservative groups attempting to censor books from the public itself (i.e. via the publisher, author, book sellers like Amazon, online sources like Google, etc). This is in contrast to the leftist mob going after these entities in an attempt to ensure nobody can obtain material with which they disagree, even private citizens obtaining it on their own dime.
  - gidam 5y ago
    Yes sure, everyone knows that librarians hide books with which they disagree, because, since Socrates, their only goal is to corrupt the young, the innocent and the virgins. LOL You don't look very familiar with libraries and books.
  - dang 5y ago
    Please do not use HN for ideological battle, regardless of what you're battling for or against. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    Amazing world we live in, where a private company (Ebay) decided not to sell a book, and that's considered by the right as equivalent to book burning and an impending sign of fascism from the left. Meanwhile the right is talking about using the authority of local governments to literally burn and ban books from public institutions like schools, and that's framed as "curation", definitely not fascist or fascist adjacent at all, but also twisted to be the fault of the left as well.
BashiBazouk 5y ago
As a kid in the 70's growing up on the beach in Santa Cruz I once watched a real book burning. It was weird. Some local christian group came down a dug a huge pit. Started a bonfire and a large group of people were tossing in books and records. When I was much older I realized with all the melted records that must have really polluted that section of the beach...
- finite_jest 5y ago
  Real book burning still do happen today: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/book-burning-at-ontario-francophone-schools-as-gesture-of-reconciliation-denounced https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/book-burning-at-ontario...
alfor 5y ago
[flagged]
- klyrs 5y ago
  > The problem we have is the destruction of the americans values... I agree, inasmuch as the American value being destroyed here are freedom of speech and freedom of religion. The latter of which should, IMO, encompass freedom from religion. But in this case, states are censoring books that go against the values of a particular religion; much like the abortion bans. If they were Muslim, there would be a deafening uproar about Sharia Law. But since they're Christian, it's just "American values." I call bullshit.
- 29329867 5y ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 5y ago
    Please do not create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Der_Einzige 5y ago
  You should ask yourself why it is that American academics seem to almost universally hold left wing freduo-marxist-post-modernist views. I love to bash on fashionable nonsense as much as the next HN reader, but it may actually have to do with there being something essential to the process of education that finds those who pursue large amounts of it to favor egalitarian social and economic politics. I look at the academy being leftist as a sign that they are genuine about education being a force for equality. Sure, sometimes the left goes "too far", but the principles behind it are the only ones compatible with modern academia. Conservatives rejection of academic philosophy is one of the reasons why the "parallel" institutions of conservative universities are a laughing stock in the USA and around the world. I trigger conservatives sometimes by reminding them that they can't code because they hate liberal education and refuse to go to anywhere with a prestigious CS program. If a Marxist professor at Berkeley is what keeps trump from having effective web developers on his team, than it looks like I just became a Marxist...
CountDrewku 5y ago
k-12 students are not adults. We ban and censor all sorts of things for the the underage crowd, look up CIPA. There are borderline pedophilia books available at school libraries. I've also seen several examples of incredibly racist CRT books in classrooms. I don't think young kids should have unfettered access to this stuff. They're not able to process it correctly. If communities are saying they do not want this is classrooms then I think that's the way it should be. Schools don't get to be an authoritarian decision maker on how everyone's kids should be raised. Aside from the censorship issue I'd rather my tax dollars go to more useful stuff than smut books.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  What is the 'correct' way to process it? Who determines what is 'correct'? When do they learn this correct way? How do they learn? Considering you seem confident in this knowledge, I eagerly await the list of citations.
  - tenebrisalietum 5y ago
    > Who determines what is 'correct'? The kids' parents. > When do they learn this correct way? The kids' parents. > How do they learn? From their parents. After all the child belongs to the parents so they get to make these decisions.
    - netizen-936824 5y ago
      In that case, why have schools at all? The parents are apparently omnipotent and can handle instruction, no?
      - tenebrisalietum 5y ago
        Some parents homeschool.
- wpurvis1 5y ago
  "I've also seen several examples of incredibly racist CRT books in classrooms." Can you list some examples?
hiram112 5y ago
[flagged]
- quadrifoliate 5y ago
  > Baloney. Yes, I'm sure we can find some 1 in a 1,000,000 exceptional case of some bright student from a marginalized community who just couldn't obtain some obscure reference book in their high school library because conservatives had "banned it" (i.e. chosen not to include it in their limited selection due to content concerns). However, I find it hard to believe that 99.9999% of students, who probably haven't even used their public school's library more than a few times in their whole life, would be absolutely unable to obtain anything they could possibly want, for the price they already spend in a week on video games or music. That is not the point. The point is that you don't want legislators, left or right-wing, picking the books that students can access in the library system of their school. School librarians are the ones who do that. It's a decentralized system that works extraordinarily well without political interference, and has done so for hundreds of years. > Examples like this apply to like 0.001% of the population, and instead of spending tens of millions of dollars and years fighting for insanely insecure voting rules... This is wholly irrelevant to the topic being discussed, which is legislatively banning books from public library systems. > Likewise, I have never ever heard of any adult using a public school library (e.g. high school or elementary school) to obtain books or other media for themselves. No, students use those libraries. Students that go to public schools. Adults usually go to their area's library systems. I suggest you check out your local library. You might find it stocked full of books that are interesting. And you can check them out, for free! The only takeaway for me from a lot of this discussion has been that a lot of people don't seem to have much of an idea about libraries in general, school or public; or the role they play in society.
  - hiram112 5y ago
    [flagged]
    - quadrifoliate 5y ago
      You are making a lot of extraordinary claims, with no sources to back them up. My guess is that you work in software (like many on this site) and are making the Dunning-Kruger mistake of thinking that you know more than you actually do about teaching and libraries. Instead, I'd encourage you to imagine how you would feel if legislators started talking about banning "dangerous, anti-capitalist operating systems like Linux". In any case, "I guess that...<wild conspiracy theory>" is not a reasonable basis for legislation, which is why these legislators are correctly being criticized.
29329867 5y ago
As a high schooler I loved the banned books list. My English teacher had a cabinet full of old copies of books they weren’t allowed to teach any more for one reason or another. She lent me The Chocolate War, Catcher in the Rye… Before that, in elementary school, some of our books had sections blacked out for being too racy. First thing I did was head straight to the local library and read those passages specifically. censorship made me an avid reader.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  Ha - It's a great signal!
  - erichocean 5y ago
    In that case, people should look deeply into the books banned on Amazon.com—great signal!
- jl2718 5y ago
  > banned books … local library. Hmmm… those evil censors must have been working overtime to stop you.
- dehrmann 5y ago
  Banning as a marketing ploy.
FundementalBrit 5y ago
The British government has a vague law on books which incite terroism... Of course they couldn't actually write an actual list because the book at the top of the list would be problematic.
- kwhitefoot 5y ago
  What book would that be?
- ausbah 5y ago
  which would be...?
  - esyir 5y ago
    Well, clearly op was insinuating the quran.
  - FundementalBrit 5y ago
    Yes it would be the Quran, Plenty of Islamic terrorists have cited from it. But of course if you were to ban it then you get into a quagmire of religious freedoms.
golemiprague 5y ago
The people who banned Dr. Seuss and many TV shows and movies for all of us are now complaining that some schools don't want to promote their extreme agendas in their curriculum and libraries? Sounds a bit hypocrite to me.
chmod775 5y ago
That is how you raise yet another generation who mistakenly believes everything written to be sacrosanct, holds no tested and cohesive views, is easy prey to manipulators who have no qualms making people uncomfortable, and will forever defer to authority figures who tell them what is acceptable.
- jl2718 5y ago
  Do you mean banning books containing well-researched facts, which is commonly practiced in silence, or promoting fantastical fiction books about your political agenda by convincing kids that the evil censorship boogeyman is after them?
  - jowsie 5y ago
    Could you give some examples of these well-researched fact containing books that are supposedly banned?
    - jl2718 5y ago
      Sorry; not getting into flame wars about the unknowable details of an unrelated topic. It’s an epistemological black hole. But you can find plenty of examples from your favorite brand of fringe on a book site that truly doesn’t censor, such as z-lib. And by the way, “factual and well-researched” doesn’t imply complete truth, but probably some form of legitimate interest. For instance, there have been many books written from collected personal testimony of alien abduction, perfectly factual and well-researched from the second-person perspective, but probably not the only sources one should consult in the study of exoplanetary astronomy. There is a wide range of topics where it is the other way around too, where folklore is celebrated, and candid observation is suppressed. In fact, it seems that human nature prefers this naturally, and even scientists can only maintain objectivity within a very narrow range.
jl2718 5y ago
The “Banned Books” movement is clearly only about any books that have faced even minor protest from “the other side” of the political spectrum. They frame the censorship debate in terms of provocative, but otherwise meaningless fiction. Real censorship of factual and relevant information exists today, and they support it.
- shkkmo 5y ago
  Who is "they" in your comment? Open Library is part of the Internet Archive which has generally been pretty effective at limiting censorship rather than promoting it..
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- lalaland1125 5y ago
  Censorship of what "factual and relevant information"? Can you provide a concrete example?
WkndTriathlete 5y ago
I'll admit that the one that puzzled me was the school district that banned "Catch-22".
- ModernMech 5y ago
  This is likely why: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22#Anti-capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22#Anti-capitalism I mean, really there's a lot in there that the people banning these books would probably find offensive. Questioning the MIC, questioning God, questioning capitalism...
  - 0x7E3 5y ago
    That's wild, I took almost the opposite message from that scene. Since the bombing run is seen as inevitable Milo engineers the situation to guarantee a minimum of actual damage is done in order to protect his profits.
- everybodyknows 5y ago
  “I remember one day we tricked two dumb high-school girls from town into the fraternity house and made them put out for all the fellows there ... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Aardvark https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Aardvark I read Catch-22 in high school, and that bit felt plenty disturbing at the time.
  - horns4lyfe 5y ago
    Are you suggesting you’d have been better off if they had banned it?
erichocean 5y ago
Are "graphic novels" really expected to be given the same treatment as actual books? It's not like school libraries typically have movies for kids to check out and watch at home. If they did have movies, it's likely that anything "R" rated would be "banned" by educators—and I doubt anyone here would care. The graphic novels being "banned" can't be posted to Instagram or Facebook or network TV because: pornographic…but we're supposed to pretend it's a "book" that's being banned? Seems disingenuous to call this "banning books."
- jfax 5y ago
  Graphic novels are books.
- cgriswald 5y ago
  Shouldn't all works of art be given the same treatment regardless of medium? In any case, claiming comic books should be treated like movies, but not like books is an odd take. Comic books are like movies in the sense that they are sequential works of art, but at that level, so are books. Many illustrated children's books are, in fact, comic books. > The graphic novels being "banned" can't be posted to Instagram or Facebook or network TV because: pornographic This is wrong on two counts. First, many of these comic books are banned for issues unrelated to sex. Second, even explicit sexual content isn't ipso facto pornography.
abeppu 5y ago
With respect to the distinction between books that are part of the curriculum and books in the school library, I think it's worth raising that kids are just reading less overall over time (perhaps 2020 being an exception). The proportion of kids who are going to the library and finding something unrelated to their classwork is shrinking. I suspect that the impulse to ban books is caused by the same cultural incuriousness that ironically makes book banning less impactful than proponents would hope. This is _especially_ true for most of the books on those banned lists. Those one of the linked lists includes such barn-burner titles as "The Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine", "Medical Ethics: Moral and Legal Conflicts in Health Care", "Race and the Media in Modern America". Kids aren't casually stumbling across these in the school library and deciding they're worth perusing. If some kid _is_ reading about medical ethics in high school, I'm guessing they're gonna find information about their topics of interest regardless. There are a bunch of books about teen pregnancy and abortion -- but I'm gonna guess that most of the time the teen pregnancies don't happen because someone first read a book literally titled "Teen Pregnancy" and decided they liked it. Similarly "A Baby Doesn't Make the Man: Alternative Sources of Power and Manhood for Young Men" probably isn't actually changing teen behavior. What ever intern in some state legislator's office drummed up suggestions for books to ban must have been pretty lazy. I'm not saying we shouldn't care about these efforts. But arguing over which books should be ignored in the library reference section is probably less important than figuring out how to get the kids to actually enjoy reading despite being raised in an environment with tiktok etc. And when you get it figured out for kids, tell me, b/c these days I mostly only get through a novel while traveling. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/feb/29/children-reading-less-says-new-research https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/feb/29/children-r... https://openlibrary.org/collections/texas-challenged https://openlibrary.org/collections/texas-challenged
stareblinkstare 5y ago
Trying to find an angle to discredit Archive.org is a pretty low-brow move. As long as they continue to host works by George Lincoln Rockwell and his ilk, they will stand their ground for you and me.
mensetmanusman 5y ago
Choice of books and ideas easily available is preference (ie all of politics is preference), especially in a library where space is zero sum relative to the 500 million books to choose from. Get involved if you disagree, but don’t be surprised people disagree in such a diverse country.
jrm4 5y ago
In a world where the cost of giving every single human being every book they could possibly want is trivial, we need to drastically rethink all of this, not the stupid and open censorship we see here, but the absurd friction that the old IP system plus Amazon creates.
musicale 5y ago
The greatest threat to digital libraries (such as libgen, sci-hub, and the Open Library itself) isn't censorship but copyright enforcement – and technology that attempts to impose the limits of physical paper onto bits.
steve76 5y ago
Life is so much easier when you get away from people. Don't show me this horrible stuff. Cure death. Stop flailing about because you failed at that. Other people do not need exposure. They see it enough. If people were a zoo animal, you wouldn't show sick alarming stuff at them. If you did and got bit, it's your fault. They are fine without you.
silexia 5y ago
The real problem here is not censorship but the public having to pay for garbage in tens of thousands of libraries while true classics are hidden or not purchased by extremely political administrators.
kwhitefoot 5y ago
Is this happening anywhere other than the US?

190 points by sohkamyung 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

> material that may cause discomfort to readers. The world is going to discomfort them more often than not so they better train also by reading all kind of books or competitors (in the broadest possible meaning) will eat them alive while they rest inside a comfortable bubble.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago
Unless they scream loud enough, and the world adapts to a few idiots. eg: jazz hands instead of clapping
- pmontra 5y ago
  I didn't know about jazz hands https://abcnews.go.com/International/universitys-move-replace-clapping-jazz-hands-sparks-controversy/story?id=58254353 https://abcnews.go.com/International/universitys-move-replac... (2018) Did they actually adopt the rule nationwide or was it discarded?

sequel_database 5y ago

There's a wide gap between banning a book and using it as curriculum. Find a happy medium.

analyte123 5y ago

Not going to hold my breath for Archive.org or the ALA's "curated collection" of books banned from Amazon.

kspacewalk2 5y ago
"Books whose authors are no longer able to give a talk on college campuses without multiple threats of physical violence against them". Curated, of course.
- shlurpy 5y ago
  So any LGBT authors and any femenists?
  - phone8675309 5y ago
    Sure, but to be fair, it's a pretty broad category these days, and not limited to just those categories.
  - kspacewalk2 5y ago
    No, I don't think so. If you meant to use those as examples, please tell me who are these LGBT and feminist authors who cannot freely give talks at American campuses these days? Other than, you know, team TERF.
zorpner 5y ago
In case anyone else was confused about the multiple comments on this post talking about "books banned from Amazon", it's about Amazon choosing not to sell books that characterize gender identities and sexual orientation as mental illness.

temp8964 5y ago

No. Select books for K-12 curriculum or school libraries is far far away from banning books. Please stop the fear-mongering.

gambiting 5y ago
I don't know where you grew up, but our school library had lots and lots and lots of books that had nothing to do with the curriculum, and students were encouraged to read outside of the required material. The idea that certain books(or indeed, entire categories of books) should be banned from a school library is definitely censorship. It's like suggesting that school computers should be banned from viewing certain pages on wikipedia, on actually, in fact, providing students with copies of paper encyclopedias with pages torn out - it's the removal of knowledge that is the hallmark of censorship.
- temp8964 5y ago
  How about school computers should be banned from viewing certain websites?
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    They already are, and it is legally required that they do so, as are libraries. https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/childrens-internet-protection-act https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/childrens-internet-prot...
  - gambiting 5y ago
    Websites are not books though and cannot be treated the same way. I see a library more like a giant encyclopedia of knowledge, you should be free to access it if you need to, without books being banned for political reasons or otherwise. Now, I do support having a kind of a "restricted section" where you can access a book normally out of sight. Say a copy of Kamasutra - it's not on a shelf, but if you need it for a project and got a permission from a teacher - go ahead.
  - ivanche 5y ago

gjsman-1000 5y ago

Nobody’s calling for banning books. They are calling for not using certain books in curriculum, which is very different and not allowing certain books is necessary for any school system. I wouldn’t want my kid to write “A kid’s version of Algebra” and then have it used in schools. I wouldn’t want a flat-earther to have his Science book in schools. Who wants Trump’s guide to Civics? That’s super different than “banning books” like it’s 1940s Germany or something. EDIT: Some are saying that this would also apply to the school library. This, in my view, doesn’t negate the schools need to discriminate between content in the least. I would not want a flat earther science book in the curriculum or in the library.

bwb 5y ago
I guess it depends a little on who is making the choices. If it is politician driven, might be fair to call it banning. If it is the school system and teachers making a choice about what to use to teach effectively that seems like good policy.
- LocalH 5y ago
  If they're public schools, the funding is governmental (state-based in the US), and thus there could be an argument made that it is still "banning". In private schools, not so much (but then again, pretty sure private schools can already control their curriculum and the books available to students from the library).
- bequanna 5y ago
  I think you have that backwards. Parents and the community should have the final say when deciding what is included in a curriculum, not (potentially activist) teachers and school boards.
  - quadrifoliate 5y ago
    > Parents and the community should have the final say ...not (potentially activist) teachers and school boards. Aren't school boards usually elected by the community? Also, generally, a lot of public school teaching is about encouraging a newer generation to think for themselves, and potentially be exposed to ideas that are not constrained by the parents and the community. Parents who want to micromanage what ideas their kid is exposed to should consider homeschooling.

quadrifoliate 5y ago

A lot of the other comments on here are saying that this is banning books from curricula [1]. But I would...like to see the sources for this assertion? All of the stories I have seen [1][2] say that the books are banned from the school library system. As far as I am aware, school libraries usually contain a wide range of books, not just whatever is required for the curriculum. So banning a book from a school library does seem to be a fairly strong suppression of ideas. Libraries have usually been the place where you go to find ideas outside the safe circle of whatever is permitted by your (usually insipid) curriculum. For example, I am not a fan of Ayn Rand's philosophy, but I am still glad I got to read her books from my school library, so I could make that decision for myself. School libraries curated by legislators with an agenda seem like a Really Bad Idea. ---------------------------------------- [1] This would be within limits, I guess, but still weird. Wouldn't you just use a different curriculum? [2] https://www.npr.org/2021/10/28/1050013664/texas-lawmaker-matt-krause-launches-inquiry-into-850-books https://www.npr.org/2021/10/28/1050013664/texas-lawmaker-mat... [3] https://www.kmuw.org/education/2021-11-09/goddard-school-district-orders-29-books-removed-from-circulation https://www.kmuw.org/education/2021-11-09/goddard-school-dis...

lr4444lr 5y ago
The books being on the school library or on classroom shelves connotes that the educational custodians of our children, who have literal and legal responsibility for their safety and well being on multiple levels, have approved them. Not so much to promote every idea they contain, but at least that they express things in a way that is psychologically appropriate for kids at their level of development. What kinds of ideas cross this line of appropriateness you or I may disagree on, but the point is that it exists in a school setting, which the article seems to pretty much miss altogether.
- TechnoTimeStop 5y ago
  Yeah cause Harry Potter should be banned because the Trans-bully-train.... LMFAO
- wolverine876 5y ago

mherdeg 5y ago

Were any of the recently withdrawn-by-publisher Seuss books, like "And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street", widely removed from school libraries? Or is this a purely "Beloved" phenomenon? The closest I could find about coverage on this was an article saying that some libraries reclassified the Seuss books as "reference" to prohibit checkouts because they were being stolen (e.g. https://oxfordobserver.org/5172/community/dr-seuss-enterprises-pulls-six-books-for-harmful-images/ https://oxfordobserver.org/5172/community/dr-seuss-enterpris...).

temp8964 5y ago

Stop confusing K-12 public school libraries with public libraries. K-12 public school libraries always have a small selection of books. Vast majority of books are not in K-12 public school libraries. There is no parallel between select books for K-12 public school libraries and banning books from libraries. If this is about you want to indoctrinate certain ideology into kids using the public school system, at least be honest about it. Stop pretending this is about banning books. Stop using the K-12 public school libraries or the public school system as the battle ground for spreading radical political ideologies. Our public school system is already bad enough.

xphilter 5y ago
Which radical political ideologies?
- Wistar 5y ago
  Those that espouse unrestricted access to knowledge.
  - temp8964 5y ago
    This might be a valid idea for academic research, not for K-12 learning. It's not even worth arguing.
    - klyrs 5y ago
      In this case, the state wants to decide what sexualities that children are allowed to be exposed to. Is that a can of worms that you really want opened? If the left demanded a ban on books that contain positive depictions of heterosexual romance (for example, A Wrinkle in Time would be banned because of the pornographic, dare I say pedophilic, kiss shared between boy and girl) would you be making the same argument?
    - xphilter 5y ago
      So which ideas are you okay with banning? Are you the person who gets to decide? If not, then who does?

derbOac 5y ago

Anyone know where there's data on challenges over time? I could only find these two things: https://www.ala.org/advocacy/sites/ala.org.advocacy/files/content/banned/frequentlychallenged/challengesbytype/2010challengesbyyearv3.png https://www.ala.org/advocacy/sites/ala.org.advocacy/files/co... https://bookriot.com/statistics-of-censorship/ https://bookriot.com/statistics-of-censorship/ I have a feeling something more comprehensive and precise is out there but I don't know where to look. The ALA has a "field report" but they charge for it and I'm not even sure if it would have the content I'm looking for. Most of the data I can find is on the most frequently challenged books, and the reasons for doing so.

gjsman-1000 5y ago

[flagged]

azeirah 5y ago
As far as I know most libraries (school libraries too probably?) are open to book requests. Unless you're asking for something like mein kampf, I don't think the librarians will look at you weirdly when asking for _any_ book whatsoever.
- belorn 5y ago
  I would assume that if someone asked a librarian for Mein Kampf, the assumption is that the student is interested in history. Similar, a student reading the Communist Manifesto is most likely not a revolutionary that want to draw inspiration for an violent insurrection, but rather a philosophy/history student that is interested to read the original text. Naturally context matter. If the student is wearing a beret and holding a AK4, maybe denying the Communist Manifesto would be the right decision at that point in time.
  - jjj123 5y ago
    In your last example I think only the gun is the problem. Even if the kid started a club for socialists and wanted to read the communist manifesto as part of their book club that should be allowed.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    I strongly dissagree, except maybe in the case you believe in reincarnation or that your life has no meaning anymore. If the student is wearing a beret and holding a AK4 the best thing to do is giving him the book.
- the_only_law 5y ago
  Hell, when I was in HS there was a copy of Mein Kampf sitting on a display stand. This was not that long ago either.
- 5y ago

balozi 5y ago

We're not the censor, you're the censor. This book banning thing is the new manufacturing of an old moral panic.

gjsman-1000 5y ago

For everyone arguing about how the library system is being censored with this, I would like to remind people that since 2000, all libraries (including non-school libraries) have the internet censored with (almost always) Google SafeSearch locked on and many websites (particularly porn but there are others) blocked. And it's federal law. https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/childrens-internet-protection-act https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/childrens-internet-prot... Is this censorship? And if so, what is the difference between internet censorship and library censorship, other than that someone printed their work instead of typing it? And why is outrage permitted for this and blocking printed books, but not for digital work?

colpabar 5y ago
The difference is that you can't accidentally click a popup that takes you to a porn website in a book. If you want to talk about specific things that are blocked by that safe filter that you think shouldn't be, that could be a discussion worth having. But anyone who has ever used the internet should know that you absolutely need some kind of filter on a school's internet connection. When I was in school, the only things online that I wanted to access that were blocked were flash games.
quadrifoliate 5y ago
The difference is that librarians already provide a "SafeSearch" by curating material at libraries. This is more similar to if Texas tried to mandate that Google SafeSearch at libraries should now include a ban on any LGBTQ images. Contrary to what you might imagine, checking out and shelving books is not the only things librarians do – they also curate and trim material, a bit like cultivating a garden. Libraries are a fine-tuned system that maximizes freedom of expression and ideas in a reasonably curated manner. It existed long before the Internet, and legislators tampering with that is always alarming.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  Would the legislators intervening be permissible in your view if the legislators believe that the librarians are doing a poor job at curation? An example of this is the right's claim that many of these banned books are almost pornographic in nature and inappropriate for almost any age. From the right's perspective, the legislators are intervening because the librarians are failing at their curation and safety job.

gidam 5y ago

It's a classic autoritarian and conservative plot. Knowledge is power, and they are fcking scared of it.

hiram112 5y ago
Love how the left is now framing this as some sort of authoritarian Fascist plot of the right, when they themselves have created the cancel culture we're now drowning in. Seems to me that the right is simply trying to curate books that are pushed on impressionable children and young adults, who are FORCED to attend public schools, paid for by taxpayers who are FORCED to fund them. I have not seen a single instance of conservative groups attempting to censor books from the public itself (i.e. via the publisher, author, book sellers like Amazon, online sources like Google, etc). This is in contrast to the leftist mob going after these entities in an attempt to ensure nobody can obtain material with which they disagree, even private citizens obtaining it on their own dime.
- gidam 5y ago
  Yes sure, everyone knows that librarians hide books with which they disagree, because, since Socrates, their only goal is to corrupt the young, the innocent and the virgins. LOL You don't look very familiar with libraries and books.
- dang 5y ago
  Please do not use HN for ideological battle, regardless of what you're battling for or against. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ModernMech 5y ago
  Amazing world we live in, where a private company (Ebay) decided not to sell a book, and that's considered by the right as equivalent to book burning and an impending sign of fascism from the left. Meanwhile the right is talking about using the authority of local governments to literally burn and ban books from public institutions like schools, and that's framed as "curation", definitely not fascist or fascist adjacent at all, but also twisted to be the fault of the left as well.

BashiBazouk 5y ago

As a kid in the 70's growing up on the beach in Santa Cruz I once watched a real book burning. It was weird. Some local christian group came down a dug a huge pit. Started a bonfire and a large group of people were tossing in books and records. When I was much older I realized with all the melted records that must have really polluted that section of the beach...

finite_jest 5y ago
Real book burning still do happen today: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/book-burning-at-ontario-francophone-schools-as-gesture-of-reconciliation-denounced https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/book-burning-at-ontario...

alfor 5y ago

[flagged]

klyrs 5y ago
> The problem we have is the destruction of the americans values... I agree, inasmuch as the American value being destroyed here are freedom of speech and freedom of religion. The latter of which should, IMO, encompass freedom from religion. But in this case, states are censoring books that go against the values of a particular religion; much like the abortion bans. If they were Muslim, there would be a deafening uproar about Sharia Law. But since they're Christian, it's just "American values." I call bullshit.
29329867 5y ago
[flagged]
- dang 5y ago
  Please do not create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Der_Einzige 5y ago
You should ask yourself why it is that American academics seem to almost universally hold left wing freduo-marxist-post-modernist views. I love to bash on fashionable nonsense as much as the next HN reader, but it may actually have to do with there being something essential to the process of education that finds those who pursue large amounts of it to favor egalitarian social and economic politics. I look at the academy being leftist as a sign that they are genuine about education being a force for equality. Sure, sometimes the left goes "too far", but the principles behind it are the only ones compatible with modern academia. Conservatives rejection of academic philosophy is one of the reasons why the "parallel" institutions of conservative universities are a laughing stock in the USA and around the world. I trigger conservatives sometimes by reminding them that they can't code because they hate liberal education and refuse to go to anywhere with a prestigious CS program. If a Marxist professor at Berkeley is what keeps trump from having effective web developers on his team, than it looks like I just became a Marxist...

CountDrewku 5y ago

k-12 students are not adults. We ban and censor all sorts of things for the the underage crowd, look up CIPA. There are borderline pedophilia books available at school libraries. I've also seen several examples of incredibly racist CRT books in classrooms. I don't think young kids should have unfettered access to this stuff. They're not able to process it correctly. If communities are saying they do not want this is classrooms then I think that's the way it should be. Schools don't get to be an authoritarian decision maker on how everyone's kids should be raised. Aside from the censorship issue I'd rather my tax dollars go to more useful stuff than smut books.

netizen-936824 5y ago
What is the 'correct' way to process it? Who determines what is 'correct'? When do they learn this correct way? How do they learn? Considering you seem confident in this knowledge, I eagerly await the list of citations.
- tenebrisalietum 5y ago
  > Who determines what is 'correct'? The kids' parents. > When do they learn this correct way? The kids' parents. > How do they learn? From their parents. After all the child belongs to the parents so they get to make these decisions.
  - netizen-936824 5y ago
    In that case, why have schools at all? The parents are apparently omnipotent and can handle instruction, no?
    - tenebrisalietum 5y ago
      Some parents homeschool.
wpurvis1 5y ago
"I've also seen several examples of incredibly racist CRT books in classrooms." Can you list some examples?

hiram112 5y ago

[flagged]

quadrifoliate 5y ago
> Baloney. Yes, I'm sure we can find some 1 in a 1,000,000 exceptional case of some bright student from a marginalized community who just couldn't obtain some obscure reference book in their high school library because conservatives had "banned it" (i.e. chosen not to include it in their limited selection due to content concerns). However, I find it hard to believe that 99.9999% of students, who probably haven't even used their public school's library more than a few times in their whole life, would be absolutely unable to obtain anything they could possibly want, for the price they already spend in a week on video games or music. That is not the point. The point is that you don't want legislators, left or right-wing, picking the books that students can access in the library system of their school. School librarians are the ones who do that. It's a decentralized system that works extraordinarily well without political interference, and has done so for hundreds of years. > Examples like this apply to like 0.001% of the population, and instead of spending tens of millions of dollars and years fighting for insanely insecure voting rules... This is wholly irrelevant to the topic being discussed, which is legislatively banning books from public library systems. > Likewise, I have never ever heard of any adult using a public school library (e.g. high school or elementary school) to obtain books or other media for themselves. No, students use those libraries. Students that go to public schools. Adults usually go to their area's library systems. I suggest you check out your local library. You might find it stocked full of books that are interesting. And you can check them out, for free! The only takeaway for me from a lot of this discussion has been that a lot of people don't seem to have much of an idea about libraries in general, school or public; or the role they play in society.
- hiram112 5y ago
  [flagged]
  - quadrifoliate 5y ago
    You are making a lot of extraordinary claims, with no sources to back them up. My guess is that you work in software (like many on this site) and are making the Dunning-Kruger mistake of thinking that you know more than you actually do about teaching and libraries. Instead, I'd encourage you to imagine how you would feel if legislators started talking about banning "dangerous, anti-capitalist operating systems like Linux". In any case, "I guess that...<wild conspiracy theory>" is not a reasonable basis for legislation, which is why these legislators are correctly being criticized.

29329867 5y ago

As a high schooler I loved the banned books list. My English teacher had a cabinet full of old copies of books they weren’t allowed to teach any more for one reason or another. She lent me The Chocolate War, Catcher in the Rye… Before that, in elementary school, some of our books had sections blacked out for being too racy. First thing I did was head straight to the local library and read those passages specifically. censorship made me an avid reader.

wolverine876 5y ago
Ha - It's a great signal!
- erichocean 5y ago
  In that case, people should look deeply into the books banned on Amazon.com—great signal!
jl2718 5y ago
> banned books … local library. Hmmm… those evil censors must have been working overtime to stop you.
dehrmann 5y ago
Banning as a marketing ploy.

FundementalBrit 5y ago

The British government has a vague law on books which incite terroism... Of course they couldn't actually write an actual list because the book at the top of the list would be problematic.

kwhitefoot 5y ago
What book would that be?
ausbah 5y ago
which would be...?
- esyir 5y ago
  Well, clearly op was insinuating the quran.
- FundementalBrit 5y ago
  Yes it would be the Quran, Plenty of Islamic terrorists have cited from it. But of course if you were to ban it then you get into a quagmire of religious freedoms.

golemiprague 5y ago

The people who banned Dr. Seuss and many TV shows and movies for all of us are now complaining that some schools don't want to promote their extreme agendas in their curriculum and libraries? Sounds a bit hypocrite to me.

chmod775 5y ago

That is how you raise yet another generation who mistakenly believes everything written to be sacrosanct, holds no tested and cohesive views, is easy prey to manipulators who have no qualms making people uncomfortable, and will forever defer to authority figures who tell them what is acceptable.

jl2718 5y ago
Do you mean banning books containing well-researched facts, which is commonly practiced in silence, or promoting fantastical fiction books about your political agenda by convincing kids that the evil censorship boogeyman is after them?
- jowsie 5y ago
  Could you give some examples of these well-researched fact containing books that are supposedly banned?
  - jl2718 5y ago
    Sorry; not getting into flame wars about the unknowable details of an unrelated topic. It’s an epistemological black hole. But you can find plenty of examples from your favorite brand of fringe on a book site that truly doesn’t censor, such as z-lib. And by the way, “factual and well-researched” doesn’t imply complete truth, but probably some form of legitimate interest. For instance, there have been many books written from collected personal testimony of alien abduction, perfectly factual and well-researched from the second-person perspective, but probably not the only sources one should consult in the study of exoplanetary astronomy. There is a wide range of topics where it is the other way around too, where folklore is celebrated, and candid observation is suppressed. In fact, it seems that human nature prefers this naturally, and even scientists can only maintain objectivity within a very narrow range.

jl2718 5y ago

The “Banned Books” movement is clearly only about any books that have faced even minor protest from “the other side” of the political spectrum. They frame the censorship debate in terms of provocative, but otherwise meaningless fiction. Real censorship of factual and relevant information exists today, and they support it.

shkkmo 5y ago
Who is "they" in your comment? Open Library is part of the Internet Archive which has generally been pretty effective at limiting censorship rather than promoting it..
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
lalaland1125 5y ago
Censorship of what "factual and relevant information"? Can you provide a concrete example?

WkndTriathlete 5y ago

I'll admit that the one that puzzled me was the school district that banned "Catch-22".

ModernMech 5y ago
This is likely why: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22#Anti-capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catch-22#Anti-capitalism I mean, really there's a lot in there that the people banning these books would probably find offensive. Questioning the MIC, questioning God, questioning capitalism...
- 0x7E3 5y ago
  That's wild, I took almost the opposite message from that scene. Since the bombing run is seen as inevitable Milo engineers the situation to guarantee a minimum of actual damage is done in order to protect his profits.
everybodyknows 5y ago
“I remember one day we tricked two dumb high-school girls from town into the fraternity house and made them put out for all the fellows there ... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Aardvark https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Aardvark I read Catch-22 in high school, and that bit felt plenty disturbing at the time.
- horns4lyfe 5y ago
  Are you suggesting you’d have been better off if they had banned it?

erichocean 5y ago

Are "graphic novels" really expected to be given the same treatment as actual books? It's not like school libraries typically have movies for kids to check out and watch at home. If they did have movies, it's likely that anything "R" rated would be "banned" by educators—and I doubt anyone here would care. The graphic novels being "banned" can't be posted to Instagram or Facebook or network TV because: pornographic…but we're supposed to pretend it's a "book" that's being banned? Seems disingenuous to call this "banning books."

jfax 5y ago
Graphic novels are books.
cgriswald 5y ago
Shouldn't all works of art be given the same treatment regardless of medium? In any case, claiming comic books should be treated like movies, but not like books is an odd take. Comic books are like movies in the sense that they are sequential works of art, but at that level, so are books. Many illustrated children's books are, in fact, comic books. > The graphic novels being "banned" can't be posted to Instagram or Facebook or network TV because: pornographic This is wrong on two counts. First, many of these comic books are banned for issues unrelated to sex. Second, even explicit sexual content isn't ipso facto pornography.

abeppu 5y ago

With respect to the distinction between books that are part of the curriculum and books in the school library, I think it's worth raising that kids are just reading less overall over time (perhaps 2020 being an exception). The proportion of kids who are going to the library and finding something unrelated to their classwork is shrinking. I suspect that the impulse to ban books is caused by the same cultural incuriousness that ironically makes book banning less impactful than proponents would hope. This is _especially_ true for most of the books on those banned lists. Those one of the linked lists includes such barn-burner titles as "The Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine", "Medical Ethics: Moral and Legal Conflicts in Health Care", "Race and the Media in Modern America". Kids aren't casually stumbling across these in the school library and deciding they're worth perusing. If some kid _is_ reading about medical ethics in high school, I'm guessing they're gonna find information about their topics of interest regardless. There are a bunch of books about teen pregnancy and abortion -- but I'm gonna guess that most of the time the teen pregnancies don't happen because someone first read a book literally titled "Teen Pregnancy" and decided they liked it. Similarly "A Baby Doesn't Make the Man: Alternative Sources of Power and Manhood for Young Men" probably isn't actually changing teen behavior. What ever intern in some state legislator's office drummed up suggestions for books to ban must have been pretty lazy. I'm not saying we shouldn't care about these efforts. But arguing over which books should be ignored in the library reference section is probably less important than figuring out how to get the kids to actually enjoy reading despite being raised in an environment with tiktok etc. And when you get it figured out for kids, tell me, b/c these days I mostly only get through a novel while traveling. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/feb/29/children-reading-less-says-new-research https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/feb/29/children-r... https://openlibrary.org/collections/texas-challenged https://openlibrary.org/collections/texas-challenged

stareblinkstare 5y ago

Trying to find an angle to discredit Archive.org is a pretty low-brow move. As long as they continue to host works by George Lincoln Rockwell and his ilk, they will stand their ground for you and me.

mensetmanusman 5y ago

Choice of books and ideas easily available is preference (ie all of politics is preference), especially in a library where space is zero sum relative to the 500 million books to choose from. Get involved if you disagree, but don’t be surprised people disagree in such a diverse country.

jrm4 5y ago

In a world where the cost of giving every single human being every book they could possibly want is trivial, we need to drastically rethink all of this, not the stupid and open censorship we see here, but the absurd friction that the old IP system plus Amazon creates.

musicale 5y ago

The greatest threat to digital libraries (such as libgen, sci-hub, and the Open Library itself) isn't censorship but copyright enforcement – and technology that attempts to impose the limits of physical paper onto bits.

steve76 5y ago

Life is so much easier when you get away from people. Don't show me this horrible stuff. Cure death. Stop flailing about because you failed at that. Other people do not need exposure. They see it enough. If people were a zoo animal, you wouldn't show sick alarming stuff at them. If you did and got bit, it's your fault. They are fine without you.

silexia 5y ago

The real problem here is not censorship but the public having to pay for garbage in tens of thousands of libraries while true classics are hidden or not purchased by extremely political administrators.

kwhitefoot 5y ago

Is this happening anywhere other than the US?