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Exactly! Parents are free to purchase books. The library isn't the only option for books.
Except for a lot of kids it is. Their parents can't afford to buy books, or have no interest in reading and don't care to supply their kids with books either. School libraries can often be the only access to books that some children have.
You are talking about mainstream books. I don't see a list of books being targeted, anywhere in the article (maybe I missed it). But in any case, mainstream books are not the issue here.
Mother Jones is in a moral panic, not over specific books being targeted, but rather the idea that a group of conservative mothers dares to organize and concentrate their political power. That seems to be the thrust of the article.
I just reread the article and no books are mentioned.
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Originally Posted by Unsettomati
Hardly.
In previous decades they were going after Judy Blume and To Kill a Mockingbird and any fantasy genre (on the inane basis that it was an introduction to the occult - Harry Potter, anyone? Before that, The Wizard of Oz, because it features a witch that is considered good!) and Fahrenheit 451 (a book about the perils of... banning books!) and Mark Twain - the list goes on and on and on...
Judy Blume's books were banned from my house too. It's written as a girl's book but introduces conflict between parents and grandparents, negative view of grandparents, intolerance of religion, etc. Not my cup of tea.
Harry Potter:
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Even though it was published at the end of the decade, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone made the list of top 100 challenged books of the decade (1990-1999), ranking at number 48. Of course, the series continued to be challenged into the new millennium where it topped the most frequently challenged list for 2000-2009. Reasons for challenging the book included: glorifying witchcraft, promoting the occult, tones of death, hate, lack of respect and sheer evil, leading children to hatred and rebellion, confusing children, and leading them astray. Some were also concerned about the increasing dark tone in the later books but overall, most of the challengers’ reasons based on religious beliefs. Luckily for us fans, libraries and intellectual freedom fighters fought censorship attempts and eventually overcame them. According to the American Library Association, Harry Potter books are now the most challenged books of the entire 21 st century. The books continue to be challenged and banned across the United States
My kids and I loved Harry Potter, but I do see some of negative points - tones of death, hate, lack of respect and sheer evil, leading children to hatred and rebellion. There sure is a lot of bullying between classmates.
To Kill a Mockingbird:
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People have been trying to ban Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird since the 1960s. And since the 1960s, they have largely failed. In one early instance, the school board of Virginia's Hanover County unanimously voted in 1966 to remove the book after board member W.C. Bosher found his son, a high school junior, reading it. The board gave little reason for the decision other than Bosher calling the book "immoral" and "improper for our children."
Letters to a local newspaper supporting removal focused on the book's discussion of rape, wherein white Atticus Finch defends black Tom Robinson in court from a false accusation by a white woman. Lee herself compared the criticism to "doublethink" in George Orwell's novel 1984 (which the board also removed), yet she wrote that the "problem is one of illiteracy, not Marxism" and sent a check to be put toward a first-grade education for the school board.
Today, campaigns against the book frequently focus on its use of the word ******. Characters (mostly white ones) use the word 48 times, because that's how many people talked in 1930s Alabama. The word gets pushback in the book on at least two occasions. When young Scout Finch asks what "******-lover" means, her father Atticus says: "Ignorant, trashy people use it when they think somebody's favoring Negroes over and above themselves. It's slipped into usage with some people like ourselves, when they want a common, ugly term to label somebody."
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz book caused controversy in 1957, in Detroit, Michigan and was banned from libraries on the basis that it had "no value" for children and supported "negativism". In 1986, one of the most publicized bannings of the book was by [B]seven Fundamentalist Christian families in Tennessee, who wanted the book banned in public schools.[/b]
The movie of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz was the first movie in color. My parents/in-laws said in 1939 when the movie was released everyone, absolutely everyone, knew WWII was about to start. The movie's first couple of scenes are in black and white. When the movie becomes a colored, there was a gasp in the theaters. It was a dramatic movie changed during a dramatic time.
So seven families wanted to ban it, big deal. In the meantime, everyone saw the movie.
Fahrenheit 451
There are many links to the fact that its been discussed as a banned book, but not links to actual places where it's been banned.
Okay so let's look at the book's other side wants banned.
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The crafty Odysseus, the man of wrath, was a trickster. He duped the Trojans with his Trojan horse, befuddled the man-eating Cyclops and withstood the deadly song of the sirens.
Though he was pre-Christian, I considered the wandering King of Ithaca as a patron saint. There was no trap he couldn't escape with his wits. His story has shaped Western literature — as well as "Star Trek" — for some 3,000 years.
But there is one thing Odysseus may not be able to withstand: The woke culture.
The political left and the growing disrupttexts movement — fueled by critical race theory — in American public schools wants him gone.
Classic Western literature, from Homer to Shakespeare, Mark Twain and even Harper Lee, is now being canceled, much in the same way that the Islamic State and early Christians destroyed ancient statues that offended them.
There is something barbarous about it all.
Just a few days ago, zealots in San Francisco began stripping "offensive names" from public schools. Names such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and even Democratic U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who is a living witness to her own cancellation.
The stripping of names are public events. They pit aging, worried traditional liberals against a radical leftist movement that will devour them as surely as the relentless Bolsheviks devoured the more moderate Mensheviks.
But the purging of great literature often takes place quietly, among woke teachers and librarians. If the classics aren't exactly banned outright or burned, they have another way:
To place offending literature on the back shelf, out of the reach of the young, where they're lost to gather dust in the shadows.
Author Padma Venkatraman wrote an essay titled "Weeding Out Racism's Invisible Roots: Rethinking Children's Classics" in the School Library Journal. She supports this purge.
"Challenging old classics is the literary equivalent of replacing statues of racist figures," she writes. "… Exposing young people to stories in which racism, sexism, ableism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate are the norm may sow seeds of bias that can grow into indifference or prejudice."
And so, the astounding complexity of great literature and great writers is now reduced, as are so many things these days, to angry zealotry and political correctness.
Shakespeare's glaring sin is his anti-Semitic treatment of Jews in the "Merchant of Venice." But isn't there value in his works? Do I really have to ask that?
Harper Lee's sin is creating hero Atticus Finch, the white liberal would-be savior of a Black man wrongly accused.
And what is the blind poet Homer's outrage? He didn't think of himself as belonging to the West, the way we think of the West.
But when Odysseus enters the underworld and meets the vain and deadly killer Achilles, Odysseus is told this:
"I would rather be a slave of a landless barbarian than king of all the dead."
A disrupttexts leader, Lorena German, author of "The Anti-Racist Teacher," explains the sweeping purge this way:
"So, let us be honest, the conversation really isn't about universality. This is about an ingrained and internalized elevation of Shakespeare in a way that excludes other voices. This is about white supremacy and colonization."
Governor of California Gavin Newsom inadvertently if rather hilariously made this point when he posted a picture of himself "reading some banned books to figure out" what Republican states "are so afraid of." Apparently no one told him that the stack of books in the photo included one banned in the state he leads, To Kill a Mockingbird, which was banned from California schools on the grounds that it contained racism.https://www.newsweek.com/when-it-com...pinion-1696045
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2022
After parent complaints about the use of racist epithets in To Kill a Mockingbird; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Cay; Of Mice and Men; and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, the Burbank (CA) Unified School District superintendent removed these titles from required classroom reading lists. Following a review committee’s recommendation, the superintendent also banned the use of the N-word in all school classes. The titles are available for individual reading and teachers can use then with small groups after the teacher has undergone training on facilitating conversations on racism, implicit bias, and racial identity. The district will also review reading lists every eight years.
Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been removed from the curriculum at a school in Philadelphia after its administration decided that “the community costs of reading this book in 11th grade outweigh the literary benefits”.
Every last book and author I listed should be read by children. And by 'children', I mean everyone who can read and is in primary school, which normally goes up to age 18. Do you not have any idea what those in middle school and high school read?
This thread is very specifically about Moms for Liberty, a group that exists in order to excise content that offends their delicate sensibilities from schools. I mentioned Judy Blume, whose book Forever the group has sought to have removed from school libraries in Brevard, Florida, for example. They have repeatedly sought to have removed books by Vonnegut (who I read in 10th grade English in the 1980s) and the masterful The Kite Runner, a book about living through the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent Taliban regime, because it contains violent depictions (gee, in a book a communist invasion, a civil war, and an oppressive regime...). The group objects to anything that acknowledges the existence of LGBT people, or racism (because supposedly, even mentioning that there's ever been racism hurts the feelings of white students). They've challenged Toni Morrison. Tim O'Brien's magnificent memoir of the Vietnam War, The Things They Carried, Steinbeck (of course, just like in decades past) and Margaret Atwood. They tried to get removed books about Martin Luther King, Jr., and the memoir of Ruby Bridges, once the little black girl memorialized by the classic Norman Rockwell painting The Problem We All Live With depicting her under attack while being escorted by federal marshals to school.
So don't dismiss 'mainstream books' as irrelevant to this conversation, when such works are a normal part of any high school library and are specifically under constant attack by the very group this thread is about.
Any book targeted by this odious group of reactionaries should immediately be read by any student that can track down a copy.
I am an old lefty from the 70's (went conservative in the 80's), and I love reading banned books. There has always been moral panic on both sides over book banning and frankly I think there's more smoke than fire in most cases, both in the books and in the banning.
Having books removed from a school library is not the same as banning them. Below is a link to a Newsweek article, and the link from that article to Moms For Liberty's "wish list". Oddly, I don't see The Cather in the Rye, A Clockwork Orange, or Ulysses on the list. Why? Could it be that those books are not in the school library in the first place? Well? Where's the moral panic over those books being previously banned by someone else? https://www.newsweek.com/moms-libert...chools-1756574 https://go.boarddocs.com/fl/ircs/Boa...mendations.pdf
My kids and I loved Harry Potter, but I do see some of negative points - tones of death, hate, lack of respect and sheer evil, leading children to hatred and rebellion. There sure is a lot of bullying between classmates.
My wife's aunt, who was a devout Catholic, raised her eyebrows about the Harry Potter books when we mentioned them to her. So I checked with our local Catholic pastor, and he told us that the first four books (only the first four had been published at the time) were fine, from the Church's point of view. Modern times, right? BTW all of the Harry Potter books were available in our kids' Catholic School library, and I read all 7 out loud to them. Starting with Book 4 they do take a dark turn, so younger avid readers might be encouraged to wait until they're 11 or 12 to read on their own.
The movie of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz was the first movie in color. My parents/in-laws said in 1939 when the movie was released everyone, absolutely everyone, knew WWII was about to start. The movie's first couple of scenes are in black and white. When the movie becomes a colored, there was a gasp in the theaters. It was a dramatic movie changed during a dramatic time.
So seven families wanted to ban it, big deal. In the meantime, everyone saw the movie.
Actually, Becky Sharp, a 1935 film, was the first Technicolor film.
There are literally dozens of authorized Oz books, some written by L. Frank Baum and the rest authorized by his estate. Many of them have been slated for banning by one group or another, for this reason or that, starting as early as 1928. https://www.openculture.com/2016/09/...oles-1928.html
Book banning and complaints about books are not new, not limited to Moms, and not limited to any political party.
...
The movie of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz was the first movie in color. My parents/in-laws said in 1939 when the movie was released everyone, absolutely everyone, knew WWII was about to start. The movie's first couple of scenes are in black and white. When the movie becomes a colored, there was a gasp in the theaters. It was a dramatic movie changed during a dramatic time.
Banning books is a war on knowledge and differing opinions. One teacher I had back in high school had the best bumper sticker I've ever seen, it said; "I read banned books" That belonged to my English teacher.
“Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so … full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change. Don’t give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.” F451
Banning books is a war on knowledge and differing opinions. One teacher I had back in high school had the best bumper sticker I've ever seen, it said; "I read banned books" That belonged to my English teacher.
But part of the question is -- are there really any banned books?
Could you name a title of a legitimate book that cannot be found in a public library, bookstore, online bookstore, or other internet sources.
In terms of schools, books should be age-appropriate. And that has nothing to do with banning books.
Don't get me wrong, any group that calls itself "Moms Against Libraries" ought to be sent to the looney bin for the name of the group alone.
But part of the question is -- are there really any banned books?
Could you name a title of a legitimate book that cannot be found in a public library, bookstore, online bookstore, or other internet sources.
In terms of schools, books should be age-appropriate. And that has nothing to do with banning books.
Don't get me wrong, any group that calls itself "Moms Against Libraries" ought to be sent to the looney bin for the name of the group alone.
"age appropriate" for who? that always reminds me of stereotyping. everyone has to obey the avg and not their own ability. there are plenty of children that are very mature for their age and many who are immature for their age. so lets punish all the children, instead of encouraging their development and then talking to them about the controversial book they read. Encourage the ones who are immature and help them advance. Public education today stinks!
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