8 ms·

Every school librarian I ever had fought against the administration constantly about restricting access to "banned books". We'd often have "banned book week" w

Every school librarian I ever had fought against the administration constantly about restricting access to "banned books". We'd often have "banned book week" where our librarians and English teachers would encourage us to read books that have either been banned in the past or were currently banned from our schools. I'm not sure what you mean about hackers restricting the flow of information, please provide a citation that backs up your blanket generalization.

fallingknife 2y ago
Yeah but do they include the spicy ones like Mein Kampf or just the ones that agree with their politics. It's not really a "banned book week" unless you're pissing everybody off.
- soulofmischief 2y ago
  Absolutely. Why is everyone responding to this thread going right to Mein Kampf? It was very easy for me to access that book. > It's not really a "banned book week" unless you're pissing everybody off. They did. Oh, they did. Lots of parents got pissed every year. Censors will censor.
  - kmeisthax 2y ago
    > Why is everyone responding to this thread going right to Mein Kampf? Because they're riding a political hobby horse, insisting that the only valid defense of 1A (free speech) is to demand a figurative repeal of 3A. i.e. to require librarians to quarter the enemy's troops in their house. Because apparently the only valid measure of how free your speech is, is how much you tolerate some of the most censorious regimes in history.
    - greenavocado 2y ago
      Enemy troops? Tolerance of censorship?
  - bombcar 2y ago
    The point they’re trying to make is the librarian is already the censor by the fact that they decide what books to buy. The librarian gets pissed if someone attempts to “do their job” or override them, either by banning a book they want or forcing them to carry a book they do not want. I find it hard to believe that someone doesn’t have some books they think the library shouldn’t carry, even if it’s just The Art of the Deal.
    - soulofmischief 2y ago
      This was simply not the case at my middle school, and since my aunt was the librarian, I had a lot of insight into the administrative war going on behind the scenes. She was constantly being denied books that she wanted to introduce into our library. The tone was set by the parents and administration, which comes from a heavy Christian brand of authoritarianism which has had the Deep South in a vice grip since the beginning. The librarians did the best they could under the circumstances, and the only way we can consider them censors is if we overgeneralize and oversimplify the situation to the point where words start to lose their semantic value and anything can be anything else if you squint hard enough.
    - cycomanic 2y ago
      And it's a bullshit argument meant to invalidate people working against authoritarian measures. If everything (even selecting/recommending books for others to read is censorship than the term becomes meaningless, which I guess is the intent of the argument).
    - UncleMeat 2y ago
      Providing a wide range of books based on pedagogical goals and training in library sciences or education is quite a bit different than showing up at a school board meeting to get a book removed because you read a one page excerpt that involved something in the valence of sex.
lurk2 2y ago
> We'd often have "banned book week" where our librarians and English teachers would encourage us to read books that have either been banned in the past or were currently banned from our schools. These titles are invariably widely accessible and banned from public schools because they contain graphic displays of sexuality that parents don’t want their children to be exposed to. The few exceptions I can think of were based on religious objections (e.g. Harry Potter). They’re never putting Mein Kampf or any book that has actually been banned by a national government on these displays.
- LPisGood 2y ago
  >They’re never putting Mein Kampf or any book that has actually been banned by a national government on these display That’s not my lived experience. Even if my experience wasn’t common, books banned by the local or state government or by other governments around the world certainly make it into those displays.
  - lurk2 2y ago
    > Even if my experience wasn’t common, books banned by the local or state government or by other governments around the world certainly make it into those displays. For example?
    - LPisGood 2y ago
      1984, Animal Farm, and Fahrenheit 451 for starters.
      - lurk2 2y ago
        All of these books have always been widely accessible in the western world, and I suppose that’s my chief objection; these books have been banned, but they have never been seriously challenged in the west. They are safe to publish and distribute here, which is what makes the whole thing so performative. I threw out Mein Kampf as the only example I could think of where a book had faced an actual ban; it was illegal to sell in the Netherlands until about ten years ago. But even my regional library carries it. I haven’t been able to find any instances of a book being banned in the USA besides a dozen or so that were banned from being mailed or transported across state lines in accordance with the Comstock Act. I would imagine the list is more extensive than these dozen or so books, and while most were pornographic, a few were culturally notable, such as the Canterbury Tales. The idea that librarians are leading a resistance movement against the looming threat of Christian ultranationalism is a rhetorical cudgel used to undermine parental rights regarding children’s education. Virtually all of the books that have ostensibly been “banned” in America have been challenged for containing material inappropriate for children. A minority of the materials are objected to on purely religious grounds; that is, the material is not necessarily obscene or inappropriate, but contradicts the religious worldview of the challenging parents. While I personally feel the latter material should be accessible to students, the right to make that determination lies firmly with a student’s parents. There is maybe an argument to be made that the challenges not based on issues of obscenity violate the spirit of freedom of information (since the challenges result in all students losing access to the books, rather than just individual students), but it is hard to make this argument when so much of the “book ban” discussion is centered around works which most people would view as inappropriate for children. 1984 is a good example; while it is a culturally significant work, it contains two or three descriptions of sexual intercourse. The sorts of people who browse a forum like this might find that quaint, but most people do not want their children being exposed to this kind of thing.
pclmulqdq 2y ago
I somehow doubt that Mein Kampf or playboy magazines would feature at "banned book week."
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - soulofmischief 2y ago
    I think both texts should be available to those who request them, but this cannot happen in a vacuum. We have to teach important context to our children early on, expose them to systems of ethics and overall ensure that they go into it understanding why Marquis de Sade was an absolute psychopath and why his writings must be read through the proper lens. And Lolita is a tragedy, a story about flawed characters. Supporting access to the novel and supporting child abuse are two wildly orthogonal stances.
    - Der_Einzige 2y ago
      The problem is that teaching marquis de Sade to young boys will make them coomer horny terrorists (it’s literally extreme graphic sex/erotica meant to arouse the reader) to the girls in their class. School is not the place for coomer fiction, or pedo fiction. Teaching Lolita is child abuse because for anyone who actually went through that experience, they have to not only relive it, but see a quasi justification for it through the fact that this book is considered “great”. It’s just like that movie hard candy. It’s all pedophilic and shouldn’t be taught.
      - soulofmischief 2y ago
        No one has to or should teach either of these books to children. As I have already stated elsewhere in this thread, this is in argument about restriction, not compulsion. You can not make something compulsory while also not restricting access to it.
ants_everywhere 2y ago
Lol you've really triggered the pro Mein Kampf culture warriors
- soulofmischief 2y ago
  Ha, I'm so confused! Where the fuck did these guys come from?
  - o11c 2y ago
    I'm pretty sure nobody commenting here actually wants Mein Kampf in particular. It's just a well-known example of a book that most people would agree to restrict. (The Anarchist Cookbook would probably be better if we need to pick a single work.) ... and since it's well known, its presence can get improperly used as a proxy for "this library is uncensored", when in fact the less-known books get restricted anyway.
    - soulofmischief 2y ago
      The Anarchist Cookbook is a great example. I had to acquire that from the internet. The people responding here mainly just come across as either ignorant or intentionally obtuse, thinking that if they can prove that in some cases the school administration overruled our teachers and librarians on the most egregious texts (as they constantly did), then the entire idea of "banned book week" is performative and not useful No one here seems to have actually made a real point, just looking for "gotchas".
      - greenavocado 2y ago
        I suspect that one is dangerous in large part because half the recipes will severely harm the implementor
    - ants_everywhere 2y ago
      Mein Kampf has been available at every school I've been at. It's not part of the curriculum but why would it be? Libraries usually have it because they have robust collections on authoritarianism for obvious reasons. The Anarchist Cookbook not so much. But neither are terrorist training manuals or other guides for making improvised weapons.

fallingknife 2y ago

Yeah but do they include the spicy ones like Mein Kampf or just the ones that agree with their politics. It's not really a "banned book week" unless you're pissing everybody off.

soulofmischief 2y ago
Absolutely. Why is everyone responding to this thread going right to Mein Kampf? It was very easy for me to access that book. > It's not really a "banned book week" unless you're pissing everybody off. They did. Oh, they did. Lots of parents got pissed every year. Censors will censor.
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  > Why is everyone responding to this thread going right to Mein Kampf? Because they're riding a political hobby horse, insisting that the only valid defense of 1A (free speech) is to demand a figurative repeal of 3A. i.e. to require librarians to quarter the enemy's troops in their house. Because apparently the only valid measure of how free your speech is, is how much you tolerate some of the most censorious regimes in history.
  - greenavocado 2y ago
    Enemy troops? Tolerance of censorship?
- bombcar 2y ago
  The point they’re trying to make is the librarian is already the censor by the fact that they decide what books to buy. The librarian gets pissed if someone attempts to “do their job” or override them, either by banning a book they want or forcing them to carry a book they do not want. I find it hard to believe that someone doesn’t have some books they think the library shouldn’t carry, even if it’s just The Art of the Deal.
  - soulofmischief 2y ago
    This was simply not the case at my middle school, and since my aunt was the librarian, I had a lot of insight into the administrative war going on behind the scenes. She was constantly being denied books that she wanted to introduce into our library. The tone was set by the parents and administration, which comes from a heavy Christian brand of authoritarianism which has had the Deep South in a vice grip since the beginning. The librarians did the best they could under the circumstances, and the only way we can consider them censors is if we overgeneralize and oversimplify the situation to the point where words start to lose their semantic value and anything can be anything else if you squint hard enough.
  - cycomanic 2y ago
    And it's a bullshit argument meant to invalidate people working against authoritarian measures. If everything (even selecting/recommending books for others to read is censorship than the term becomes meaningless, which I guess is the intent of the argument).
  - UncleMeat 2y ago
    Providing a wide range of books based on pedagogical goals and training in library sciences or education is quite a bit different than showing up at a school board meeting to get a book removed because you read a one page excerpt that involved something in the valence of sex.

lurk2 2y ago

> We'd often have "banned book week" where our librarians and English teachers would encourage us to read books that have either been banned in the past or were currently banned from our schools. These titles are invariably widely accessible and banned from public schools because they contain graphic displays of sexuality that parents don’t want their children to be exposed to. The few exceptions I can think of were based on religious objections (e.g. Harry Potter). They’re never putting Mein Kampf or any book that has actually been banned by a national government on these displays.

LPisGood 2y ago
>They’re never putting Mein Kampf or any book that has actually been banned by a national government on these display That’s not my lived experience. Even if my experience wasn’t common, books banned by the local or state government or by other governments around the world certainly make it into those displays.
- lurk2 2y ago
  > Even if my experience wasn’t common, books banned by the local or state government or by other governments around the world certainly make it into those displays. For example?
  - LPisGood 2y ago
    1984, Animal Farm, and Fahrenheit 451 for starters.
    - lurk2 2y ago
      All of these books have always been widely accessible in the western world, and I suppose that’s my chief objection; these books have been banned, but they have never been seriously challenged in the west. They are safe to publish and distribute here, which is what makes the whole thing so performative. I threw out Mein Kampf as the only example I could think of where a book had faced an actual ban; it was illegal to sell in the Netherlands until about ten years ago. But even my regional library carries it. I haven’t been able to find any instances of a book being banned in the USA besides a dozen or so that were banned from being mailed or transported across state lines in accordance with the Comstock Act. I would imagine the list is more extensive than these dozen or so books, and while most were pornographic, a few were culturally notable, such as the Canterbury Tales. The idea that librarians are leading a resistance movement against the looming threat of Christian ultranationalism is a rhetorical cudgel used to undermine parental rights regarding children’s education. Virtually all of the books that have ostensibly been “banned” in America have been challenged for containing material inappropriate for children. A minority of the materials are objected to on purely religious grounds; that is, the material is not necessarily obscene or inappropriate, but contradicts the religious worldview of the challenging parents. While I personally feel the latter material should be accessible to students, the right to make that determination lies firmly with a student’s parents. There is maybe an argument to be made that the challenges not based on issues of obscenity violate the spirit of freedom of information (since the challenges result in all students losing access to the books, rather than just individual students), but it is hard to make this argument when so much of the “book ban” discussion is centered around works which most people would view as inappropriate for children. 1984 is a good example; while it is a culturally significant work, it contains two or three descriptions of sexual intercourse. The sorts of people who browse a forum like this might find that quaint, but most people do not want their children being exposed to this kind of thing.

pclmulqdq 2y ago

I somehow doubt that Mein Kampf or playboy magazines would feature at "banned book week."

Der_Einzige 2y ago
[flagged]
- soulofmischief 2y ago
  I think both texts should be available to those who request them, but this cannot happen in a vacuum. We have to teach important context to our children early on, expose them to systems of ethics and overall ensure that they go into it understanding why Marquis de Sade was an absolute psychopath and why his writings must be read through the proper lens. And Lolita is a tragedy, a story about flawed characters. Supporting access to the novel and supporting child abuse are two wildly orthogonal stances.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    The problem is that teaching marquis de Sade to young boys will make them coomer horny terrorists (it’s literally extreme graphic sex/erotica meant to arouse the reader) to the girls in their class. School is not the place for coomer fiction, or pedo fiction. Teaching Lolita is child abuse because for anyone who actually went through that experience, they have to not only relive it, but see a quasi justification for it through the fact that this book is considered “great”. It’s just like that movie hard candy. It’s all pedophilic and shouldn’t be taught.
    - soulofmischief 2y ago
      No one has to or should teach either of these books to children. As I have already stated elsewhere in this thread, this is in argument about restriction, not compulsion. You can not make something compulsory while also not restricting access to it.

ants_everywhere 2y ago

Lol you've really triggered the pro Mein Kampf culture warriors

soulofmischief 2y ago
Ha, I'm so confused! Where the fuck did these guys come from?
- o11c 2y ago
  I'm pretty sure nobody commenting here actually wants Mein Kampf in particular. It's just a well-known example of a book that most people would agree to restrict. (The Anarchist Cookbook would probably be better if we need to pick a single work.) ... and since it's well known, its presence can get improperly used as a proxy for "this library is uncensored", when in fact the less-known books get restricted anyway.
  - soulofmischief 2y ago
    The Anarchist Cookbook is a great example. I had to acquire that from the internet. The people responding here mainly just come across as either ignorant or intentionally obtuse, thinking that if they can prove that in some cases the school administration overruled our teachers and librarians on the most egregious texts (as they constantly did), then the entire idea of "banned book week" is performative and not useful No one here seems to have actually made a real point, just looking for "gotchas".
    - greenavocado 2y ago
      I suspect that one is dangerous in large part because half the recipes will severely harm the implementor
  - ants_everywhere 2y ago
    Mein Kampf has been available at every school I've been at. It's not part of the curriculum but why would it be? Libraries usually have it because they have robust collections on authoritarianism for obvious reasons. The Anarchist Cookbook not so much. But neither are terrorist training manuals or other guides for making improvised weapons.