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No, librarians curate their collections, they do not indiscriminately cram the shelves full of anything anyone gives them. Take a look at the processing of dona
by NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
No, librarians curate their collections, they do not indiscriminately cram the shelves full of anything anyone gives them. Take a look at the processing of donations; most books are discarded, especially today when books are deprecated.
Libraries withdrawing books aren't banning them. If a school had banned a book, then the students would be prohibited from reading it. A student can read whatever he/she wants during free time, at home, whatever. I would imagine that if a teacher assigned a "free choice" book report that a student could even report on a so-called banned book.
The point of withdrawing books from schools and libraries is because they do not fit in the curriculum. Library shelves and curricula have finite space for materials. You can only teach N books per year, and so your school's curriculum decides which N books that's going to be, year over year.
The point of using the word "ban" in headlines is because it is sensationalistic and it angers people and makes them click on that headline and react with outrage that anyone would be exercising such reprehensible censorship. By using the word "ban" they take the focus away from the action or the content of the book and place it on perceived injustice. Even if I disagree with that book's contents, I can be outraged! How do we even know the content and theme of that book, because we didn't even read it!
To read all these headlines coming out, you would think that we are living in Fahrenheit 451 and that firemen are coming out to torch a big "bonfire of the vanities" style of deprecated textbooks and shitty novels. It's hilarious.
- remarkEon 3y agoYou're being downvoted but your analysis is correct. In this case, the article is meant to combine two clickbait antagonists ("book bans" and "ChatGPT"). Like you mention, there's a finite amount of both physical space and time for "books" in a library and curriculum. I'm not sure if people are imagining that both of these things are infinite, but decisions will eventually have to be made about what to include or not. "Book bans" is a good sorting phrase, because people like to imagine (as some sort of LARP) that their political enemies are the Nazis from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, marching around in a circle lighting otherwise reasonable things on fire. Doing this makes it easier to bully people in the middle to agreeing with you, and less easy to actually take a dispassionate approach to analysis of the situation.