How many of the parents who so eagerly push for book bans, ostensibly to protect their offspring from inappropriate content, are monitoring their social media access -- what they view, when and where they view it, how they interact with their peers, and what they do with that information when not supervised?
How many of the parents who so eagerly push for book bans, ostensibly to protect their offspring from inappropriate content, are monitoring their social media access -- what they view, when and where they view it, how they interact with their peers, and what they do with that information when not supervised?
Who is watching and caring for their kids when they are not at home?
And how much time are those parents actually spending with their children even in the home environment, building up value systems and educational approaches that encourage critical thinking, diversity of perspectives, and the development of other such skills that will be useful later in life, as opposed to creating the expectation that you can simply wish away whatever you don't want for them to see and use?
Asking for a friend. And for myself. And for everyone who feels that parental oversight is less about treating their children as a piece of property ("my kids") and more about preparing them to be literate, aware citizens who are emotionally and intellectually ready to deal with important aspects of daily life such as differences of opinion and shared solutions to public issues.
I don't disagree. It may be useful to note that these book banners are coming a place of "it is my right as a parent to handle how my children learn about sex, contraception, sexuality, morality and the like. Kids being taught sex ed and access to books about anything other than God's version of marriage and sex takes away my rights as a parent." This is from my devout Trumpian friend.
What I worry about, in addition to all the great stuff commenters have posted, is the kids with crappy parents - those kids need to know there is more in the world than what their home life reflects, and that is is WORTH WAITING FOR.
Fully agree. Little in life so ticks me off as when I hear someone play the "it is my right as a parent" card. As noted, beyond the evident selfishness of it, it makes the children seem objectified, more like a piece of property than actual human lives, and it becomes more about what the parent wants than what the child needs when whatever they choose for the kids will have an impact on others, not just their own family. The best parents I know have a habit of leading by example and gradually giving their kids the latitude to make their own informed life choices and understand how to use that personal power effectively as important growth experiences relative to the world around them. In contrast I see too many insecure parents who, in making it so much about themselves, inhibit the development of the children and wind up raising brats who emulate that selfish world view that it is primarily about the self and getting theirs, with a pronounced lack of empathy for others. That isn't true of everyone, of course, but I've seen it enough times that it doesn't surprise me when one of those children ultimately self-identifies as a liberal and the other as a conservative based on their upbringing.
Parental rights groups are the shock troops of an invading fascism. It is locally grounded but internationally funded. Yesterday in Canada there were country-wide, coordinated demonstrations against teaching sex education and gender in schools. There were also counter demonstrations in support of gender equality and safety.
It was really great to see that here as well as across the entire country, the gender supportive demonstrators outnumbered the other group two to one. The local CBC station had a steamed up father yelling about how he didn’t want schools talking
….talking about sex and gender to his kids because they were his “biological property”. There was also a shot of a young kid of about eight in tears as his Mom was yelling at a woman carrying a gender-inclusion flag while the kid was trying to pull his Mom away. I worry about the harm some those parents are doing to their own kids.
I taught high school for 15 years, ending in 2022. For my school, and I can't speak for others, but I would put the number at 10% for parents monitoring their kids online activity. My daughter is 12 and she has friends who have Tik Tok, Twitter, you name it... not happening in my family. I explain these things to her so that she understands. Some of these were kids whose families are quite religious and I can imagine they are brought up quite "strictly". Except they are allowing their kids access to the worst of society at the same time.
I have fantasized about someone starting a fund to hand out free e-readers, preloaded with $100 gift cards to spend according to freedom of choice. Maybe that’s the “new” public library.
Thank you, Katie! I’m definitely going to contribute! This is community in action, including this forum where I learned about these efforts. Wow; a bit of optimism.
This is awesome! I’ve never heard of the Public Digital Public Library of America. I’m curious how you encountered it - and I wish there was a way to get the word out on mass media. Thank you - I’m so happy to know there’s effective resistance out there taking action.
I came across it on social media. And I have read about the city and district libraries as articles in regular media. I do wish they would do a mass awareness campaign, though.
You are asking the right question here about online content and social media and the answer is something along the lines of: "Everything you can imagine (and some stuff you can't)", followed closely by "you would rather not know what your kids are seeing, but you have to."
On a more positive note, my daughter recently announced that she is reading Fahrenheit 451 for English class, which started a good family discussion which will continue as she makes her way through the book. She attends a private school which made me wonder whether her friends in public school would find this book in their school library.
We now divide into two camps - those that believe education should exist to teach that things are supposed to be a certain way, and those that believe that education should exist to teach our kids how to ask big hard questions, research facts, and learn critical thinking and problem solving skills.
The first Nazi book burning took place on May 10, 1933. Today, the warnings are getting louder, and more frequent.
"...you would rather not know what your kids are seeing, but you have to."
When my son was in middle school he attended a local STEM "magnet" school. This meant roughly two hours a day riding the bus; first to his "home" school and then across town to the magnet school.
I got daily/weekly reports on the behavior during these bus rides. Any reasonable parent who heard what actually happens on these bus rides would put their child in bubble wrap and parachute them to the school.
There's too much to describe when discussing behavior on the bus but it boiled down to three things. First, if your child was raised to avoid cussing then you have wasted your parental time. On the bus, my son learned a collection of profanity that would make the proverbial sailor blush.
Second, just bad behavior. Lots of fights (usually in the very back of the bus). On one of these bus rides another young man, someone I met as a Scoutmaster, decide he had enough of his 2 liter Mountain Dew (breakfast!) during the brief ride on the interstate that goes through the middle of town. This goofus just chucked the almost empty bottle out of the bus window.Situational awareness was not involved. The wayward bottle exited the window and then hit a vehicle behind the bus square in the middle of its windshield.
Unfortunately the car in question was a city police car. The bus was promptly pulled over and the officer addressed the bus's occupants. He said that nobody was going anywhere until the miscreant 'fessed up. To his credit my young scout stood up and took the blame for his actions. Later I asked him why in God's Green Earth he did this. "I dunno" was the answer. "Just because?" And again it's important to understand that the bus was full of *AP* students headed toward the magnet school.
Finally, there's the sex. Lots and lots of sex. <cough>Coupling</cough> in the bus seats, public masturbation, flashing etc. The only saving grace was that this was was before every child had a cell phone or I would imagine there would be pictures and probably videos.
I told my son that as soon as he could get a drivers' license he'd have a vehicle to drive to school.
My hope is that the kids, rebellious as their teen instincts lead them to be, will spite their parents and actually seek out the banned books and both read them and have literate discussions about them with their peers. As we all know, nothing quite moves their participation like being told that they aren't allowed to do it. Fingers crossed.
Story of my life in early elementary. Mostly the librarian was trying to herd me toward stuff she considered more age appropriate for a first grader than, say, The Three Musketeers (which I didn't really understand, sure, but I read the whole thing.)
By the third grade I had her worn down and had free run of the whole library.
In 1940s small town Ohio, the librarian wouldn't let me check out a book on Satchmo and gave me a young people's version. I told my aunt and she went to the library and checked the adult book out for me and I read it (lots about selling weed). Long live subversion!
The worst part was transferring in the middle of third grade to another school that had a sharp cutoff line between the 3rd grade and lower section and the everyone else section.
The 3rd and lower section was Raggedy Ann and Andy picture books. If somebody hadn't snuck a series of biology primers into that section, I would've gone nuts that semester. As it was, I was the only kid in the school probably who knew what larvae and pupae and the life cycles of butterflies were.
Come the fourth grade I was transferred again to a science and math magnet school, opening day we go to the library and the librarian is walking us around and I gear myself for battle and ask what sections we're allowed to get books from and she's like "All of them" and it was like the heavens opened up and rained literary manna on me.
I was the perfect rule follower until that afternoon I visited a friend after school. We smoked Marlboros in his garage and went inside. He brought out a mysterious album with middle earth artwork and no band name, album name, no words at all.
When the needle dropped on Led Zeppelin IV, life for this latch key kid was forever changed because I realized there were so many more roads to travel beyond those that were striped and lighted.
I am a rock and metal fan. So, so many of my faves were tagged with that sticker whether it was for profanity, sex, drugs, or blasphemy. But there were a lot of great hip hop records, especially West Coast G Funk, that were tagged.
I'm rock and metal too, it's just that the 2 Live Crew was so memorable. I'm pretty sure my Metallica Master of Puppets cassette was labeled Parental Advisory.
Yeah, let’s hope. But here’s the challenge. Some kids are intellectually rebellious and some kids take what they’re given and don’t ask questions. Yet the goal of public education, it seems to me, is to challenge students: inspire them to think for themselves, compose rational arguments that can be supported with evidence and/or logic and in short, develop critical thinking. When all of these educational techniques are removed or replaced with soft, comfortable and non thought provoking rhetoric, some students will reject the pablum, but most will simply move along, gaining nothing.
If you are enlightened, you meant, "compose cogent arguments that can be supported with evidence and/or logic and in short, develop rational thinking."
For sure! My GOD...the kids could be doing bad stuff like attending Beetlejuice and being in the audience next to adults publicly groping each other...
"aware citizens who are emotionally and intellectually ready to deal with important aspects of daily life such as differences of opinion and shared solutions to public issues."
You mean indoctrination! Teaching kids to think critically, and leaning that most issues in life are complex could make them feel badly about themselves. Until you learn how to do it, thinking is much more difficult than just believing what you're told. Once you get the hang of it, thinking is kind of fun -- and helpful.
Of course! Do you think a person who could think critically would ever vote for Trump? Or Boebart or Santos? These people have power because mindless drones elected them.
I began teaching my grands there letters & numbers at 2. They were little “sponges” who now at 7 & 10 are constant readers and doing well in math. We visit our local Library on a regular basis, something my mother started me doing as a child. Why anyone would want to take the joy of reading and learning away from the American people is just beyond my understanding. You don’t have to read books you don’t agree with but you just might learn something new by doing so. Give it a try!
I was a scout leader in the 80s and 90s and at scout summer camp, we would have nightly campfires where the boys - away from the mother's for a rare week - would tell dirty jokes (not really all that dirty but for them this was new). It was a way to let loose. One year we had a father who encountered this (he stayed over to see a campfire) - he was disgusted and he tried to get me to agree with him (my son was one of the few who did not engage in the joking) - but I told him that we have worked with boys for years and this campfire experience is both harmless and the boys bond to each other by this experience.
But the parent did not stay with the scout troop for much longer.
Hey, sex and sexuality actually exist. Learning to understand yourself and other people through a book is an excellent, self paced way to find out about the world beyond yours.
Clearly some things are not appropriate for public or school library bookshelves, just as not all video or audio content is right for public airwaves. But are examples like that the exception or the rule when the far right proposes what should be off-limits to young viewers? The banned book lists I've seen, and readings I've attended, seem to have a lot of dubious choices on them, more grounded in not wanting to have someone's feelings hurt or opinions challenged than in any real threat to the healthy development of the mind and the intellect.
Sometimes too much shelter from ideas can be more harmful than not enough.
How many of the parents who so eagerly push for book bans, ostensibly to protect their offspring from inappropriate content, are monitoring their social media access -- what they view, when and where they view it, how they interact with their peers, and what they do with that information when not supervised?
Who is watching and caring for their kids when they are not at home?
And how much time are those parents actually spending with their children even in the home environment, building up value systems and educational approaches that encourage critical thinking, diversity of perspectives, and the development of other such skills that will be useful later in life, as opposed to creating the expectation that you can simply wish away whatever you don't want for them to see and use?
Asking for a friend. And for myself. And for everyone who feels that parental oversight is less about treating their children as a piece of property ("my kids") and more about preparing them to be literate, aware citizens who are emotionally and intellectually ready to deal with important aspects of daily life such as differences of opinion and shared solutions to public issues.
I don't disagree. It may be useful to note that these book banners are coming a place of "it is my right as a parent to handle how my children learn about sex, contraception, sexuality, morality and the like. Kids being taught sex ed and access to books about anything other than God's version of marriage and sex takes away my rights as a parent." This is from my devout Trumpian friend.
What I worry about, in addition to all the great stuff commenters have posted, is the kids with crappy parents - those kids need to know there is more in the world than what their home life reflects, and that is is WORTH WAITING FOR.
Fully agree. Little in life so ticks me off as when I hear someone play the "it is my right as a parent" card. As noted, beyond the evident selfishness of it, it makes the children seem objectified, more like a piece of property than actual human lives, and it becomes more about what the parent wants than what the child needs when whatever they choose for the kids will have an impact on others, not just their own family. The best parents I know have a habit of leading by example and gradually giving their kids the latitude to make their own informed life choices and understand how to use that personal power effectively as important growth experiences relative to the world around them. In contrast I see too many insecure parents who, in making it so much about themselves, inhibit the development of the children and wind up raising brats who emulate that selfish world view that it is primarily about the self and getting theirs, with a pronounced lack of empathy for others. That isn't true of everyone, of course, but I've seen it enough times that it doesn't surprise me when one of those children ultimately self-identifies as a liberal and the other as a conservative based on their upbringing.
Fahrenheit 451;Florida
Parental rights groups are the shock troops of an invading fascism. It is locally grounded but internationally funded. Yesterday in Canada there were country-wide, coordinated demonstrations against teaching sex education and gender in schools. There were also counter demonstrations in support of gender equality and safety.
It was really great to see that here as well as across the entire country, the gender supportive demonstrators outnumbered the other group two to one. The local CBC station had a steamed up father yelling about how he didn’t want schools talking
….talking about sex and gender to his kids because they were his “biological property”. There was also a shot of a young kid of about eight in tears as his Mom was yelling at a woman carrying a gender-inclusion flag while the kid was trying to pull his Mom away. I worry about the harm some those parents are doing to their own kids.
That’s heartbreaking.
Heartbreakingly ironic to see a mom harm her own kid while she is accusing a counter-protester of harming kids.
I taught high school for 15 years, ending in 2022. For my school, and I can't speak for others, but I would put the number at 10% for parents monitoring their kids online activity. My daughter is 12 and she has friends who have Tik Tok, Twitter, you name it... not happening in my family. I explain these things to her so that she understands. Some of these were kids whose families are quite religious and I can imagine they are brought up quite "strictly". Except they are allowing their kids access to the worst of society at the same time.
And as the focus shifts from school libraries to public libraries, I am hoping that the overreach comes back to bite them.
Not just them. I'm talking about "religious (indoctrinating)schools".
I have fantasized about someone starting a fund to hand out free e-readers, preloaded with $100 gift cards to spend according to freedom of choice. Maybe that’s the “new” public library.
MoveOn has a banned bookmobile handing out for free banned books. You can support these efforts at moveon.org.
Thank you, Katie! I’m definitely going to contribute! This is community in action, including this forum where I learned about these efforts. Wow; a bit of optimism.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/banned-book-club-app-180982592/
This this great resource; it is customized for your area. And there are other libraries (NYC comes to mind) who are offering free ebooks.
This is awesome! I’ve never heard of the Public Digital Public Library of America. I’m curious how you encountered it - and I wish there was a way to get the word out on mass media. Thank you - I’m so happy to know there’s effective resistance out there taking action.
I came across it on social media. And I have read about the city and district libraries as articles in regular media. I do wish they would do a mass awareness campaign, though.
Yes, me too. Well, I’m doing my part to spread the word - I told my daughter who is an educator, for starters. I can’t believe we are in this moment.
You are asking the right question here about online content and social media and the answer is something along the lines of: "Everything you can imagine (and some stuff you can't)", followed closely by "you would rather not know what your kids are seeing, but you have to."
On a more positive note, my daughter recently announced that she is reading Fahrenheit 451 for English class, which started a good family discussion which will continue as she makes her way through the book. She attends a private school which made me wonder whether her friends in public school would find this book in their school library.
We now divide into two camps - those that believe education should exist to teach that things are supposed to be a certain way, and those that believe that education should exist to teach our kids how to ask big hard questions, research facts, and learn critical thinking and problem solving skills.
The first Nazi book burning took place on May 10, 1933. Today, the warnings are getting louder, and more frequent.
Sadly, you couldn't be more right.
"...you would rather not know what your kids are seeing, but you have to."
When my son was in middle school he attended a local STEM "magnet" school. This meant roughly two hours a day riding the bus; first to his "home" school and then across town to the magnet school.
I got daily/weekly reports on the behavior during these bus rides. Any reasonable parent who heard what actually happens on these bus rides would put their child in bubble wrap and parachute them to the school.
There's too much to describe when discussing behavior on the bus but it boiled down to three things. First, if your child was raised to avoid cussing then you have wasted your parental time. On the bus, my son learned a collection of profanity that would make the proverbial sailor blush.
Second, just bad behavior. Lots of fights (usually in the very back of the bus). On one of these bus rides another young man, someone I met as a Scoutmaster, decide he had enough of his 2 liter Mountain Dew (breakfast!) during the brief ride on the interstate that goes through the middle of town. This goofus just chucked the almost empty bottle out of the bus window.Situational awareness was not involved. The wayward bottle exited the window and then hit a vehicle behind the bus square in the middle of its windshield.
Unfortunately the car in question was a city police car. The bus was promptly pulled over and the officer addressed the bus's occupants. He said that nobody was going anywhere until the miscreant 'fessed up. To his credit my young scout stood up and took the blame for his actions. Later I asked him why in God's Green Earth he did this. "I dunno" was the answer. "Just because?" And again it's important to understand that the bus was full of *AP* students headed toward the magnet school.
Finally, there's the sex. Lots and lots of sex. <cough>Coupling</cough> in the bus seats, public masturbation, flashing etc. The only saving grace was that this was was before every child had a cell phone or I would imagine there would be pictures and probably videos.
I told my son that as soon as he could get a drivers' license he'd have a vehicle to drive to school.
My hope is that the kids, rebellious as their teen instincts lead them to be, will spite their parents and actually seek out the banned books and both read them and have literate discussions about them with their peers. As we all know, nothing quite moves their participation like being told that they aren't allowed to do it. Fingers crossed.
Spot on. It sure as hell worked for me.
Kids will do this - the ones who are readers will seek out the banned material. Guaranteed.
God bless them every one
Story of my life in early elementary. Mostly the librarian was trying to herd me toward stuff she considered more age appropriate for a first grader than, say, The Three Musketeers (which I didn't really understand, sure, but I read the whole thing.)
By the third grade I had her worn down and had free run of the whole library.
In 1940s small town Ohio, the librarian wouldn't let me check out a book on Satchmo and gave me a young people's version. I told my aunt and she went to the library and checked the adult book out for me and I read it (lots about selling weed). Long live subversion!
Your aunt sounds awesome.
The worst part was transferring in the middle of third grade to another school that had a sharp cutoff line between the 3rd grade and lower section and the everyone else section.
The 3rd and lower section was Raggedy Ann and Andy picture books. If somebody hadn't snuck a series of biology primers into that section, I would've gone nuts that semester. As it was, I was the only kid in the school probably who knew what larvae and pupae and the life cycles of butterflies were.
Come the fourth grade I was transferred again to a science and math magnet school, opening day we go to the library and the librarian is walking us around and I gear myself for battle and ask what sections we're allowed to get books from and she's like "All of them" and it was like the heavens opened up and rained literary manna on me.
20% tops. I'm talking about reading of actual literature. Those students (I was one of them myself) are a big minority.
Deutschmeister, this is exactly what I have thought all along. Childhood and teen rebellion to the rescue!
I was the perfect rule follower until that afternoon I visited a friend after school. We smoked Marlboros in his garage and went inside. He brought out a mysterious album with middle earth artwork and no band name, album name, no words at all.
When the needle dropped on Led Zeppelin IV, life for this latch key kid was forever changed because I realized there were so many more roads to travel beyond those that were striped and lighted.
Remember the Parental Advisory Explicit Lyrics stickers the PMRC got the RIAA to adopt? That's how you knew it was an album worth getting.
In general the lack of gifs in this venue is for the better, but I so wish I could throw up the horns in reply.
So... use your imagination.
\m/ is always there for you
Yep. When I was 15 and 16 years old, that sticker meant the album was good. 2 Live Crew comes to mind.
I am a rock and metal fan. So, so many of my faves were tagged with that sticker whether it was for profanity, sex, drugs, or blasphemy. But there were a lot of great hip hop records, especially West Coast G Funk, that were tagged.
I'm rock and metal too, it's just that the 2 Live Crew was so memorable. I'm pretty sure my Metallica Master of Puppets cassette was labeled Parental Advisory.
Yeah, let’s hope. But here’s the challenge. Some kids are intellectually rebellious and some kids take what they’re given and don’t ask questions. Yet the goal of public education, it seems to me, is to challenge students: inspire them to think for themselves, compose rational arguments that can be supported with evidence and/or logic and in short, develop critical thinking. When all of these educational techniques are removed or replaced with soft, comfortable and non thought provoking rhetoric, some students will reject the pablum, but most will simply move along, gaining nothing.
If you are enlightened, you meant, "compose cogent arguments that can be supported with evidence and/or logic and in short, develop rational thinking."
I like your version better. Thanks.
Amen.
For sure! My GOD...the kids could be doing bad stuff like attending Beetlejuice and being in the audience next to adults publicly groping each other...
And on their first date, too!
She’s the embodiment of every high school mean girl we’ve all encountered. Stupidity and viciousness in a deceptive package.
"aware citizens who are emotionally and intellectually ready to deal with important aspects of daily life such as differences of opinion and shared solutions to public issues."
You mean indoctrination! Teaching kids to think critically, and leaning that most issues in life are complex could make them feel badly about themselves. Until you learn how to do it, thinking is much more difficult than just believing what you're told. Once you get the hang of it, thinking is kind of fun -- and helpful.
"Teaching kids to think critically,"
Isn't that wokism?
Of course! Do you think a person who could think critically would ever vote for Trump? Or Boebart or Santos? These people have power because mindless drones elected them.
I hope so.
More people should try this!!!
Teaching critical thinking and the science of reading are pursuits in elementary education.
I began teaching my grands there letters & numbers at 2. They were little “sponges” who now at 7 & 10 are constant readers and doing well in math. We visit our local Library on a regular basis, something my mother started me doing as a child. Why anyone would want to take the joy of reading and learning away from the American people is just beyond my understanding. You don’t have to read books you don’t agree with but you just might learn something new by doing so. Give it a try!
I was a scout leader in the 80s and 90s and at scout summer camp, we would have nightly campfires where the boys - away from the mother's for a rare week - would tell dirty jokes (not really all that dirty but for them this was new). It was a way to let loose. One year we had a father who encountered this (he stayed over to see a campfire) - he was disgusted and he tried to get me to agree with him (my son was one of the few who did not engage in the joking) - but I told him that we have worked with boys for years and this campfire experience is both harmless and the boys bond to each other by this experience.
But the parent did not stay with the scout troop for much longer.
Parents virtue signaling with their own children is nauseating but real.
So, support the freedom to read, but not the freedom to breed -- except for the elect. Really?
Hey, sex and sexuality actually exist. Learning to understand yourself and other people through a book is an excellent, self paced way to find out about the world beyond yours.
Clearly some things are not appropriate for public or school library bookshelves, just as not all video or audio content is right for public airwaves. But are examples like that the exception or the rule when the far right proposes what should be off-limits to young viewers? The banned book lists I've seen, and readings I've attended, seem to have a lot of dubious choices on them, more grounded in not wanting to have someone's feelings hurt or opinions challenged than in any real threat to the healthy development of the mind and the intellect.
Sometimes too much shelter from ideas can be more harmful than not enough.
Sounds to me like you had a very rich (in values), family-oriented upbringing. Thanks for sharing.