I read Helter Skelter in seventh grade. My mother read it and I took it and read it. She never said anything about it.
However, I knew NOTHING about sex until I was about in 9th grade. My friends told dirty jokes and I laughed along without understanding a thing. I wish my mother would have left out a “sex” book for me!
Fortunately, I’m a law abiding citizen, albeit with a penchant for murder mysteries and crime shows. I did eventually learn about the birds and the bees partly from the Harlequin romances that were in my high school library! Now that should have created an uproar in the community- we were in the Bible Belt!
That’s the problem that any new method of teaching faces. Even if the new method is better considered in isolation or in trials and experiments, it may not be in a real world where existing teachers know the old method but not the new method. Unfortunately, that means that incumbency often wins, even if it is worse.
I’m pretty happy to find out schools still have libraries and that students want to check out books! My kids rarely had time during the school day to visit a library (never any free periods), but sometimes went after school. You have to be a certain kind of kid to want to go to the library when it isn’t required. Maybe if the school library had Playboy or some other good literature (just for the articles) more students would head to the library more often and stumble upon some other books.
When my daughter was in middle school she came home with a reading list of some pretty controversial books - for her. She’s adopted from China and two of the books were about Chinese girls who were orphans or whose mothers died and their stepmothers were cruel to them. Too Much for her at 10 years old. There were other books on the list and I directed her to those books (after reading them first myself). I was fine with the books being on the list for other kids, but for her at that time they were too advanced and would have required her to deal with too much. Her sister, the same age? No problem with any books on the list.
So perhaps if the parents were more involved it wouldn’t be such a problem?
I was the 11 year old reading The Godfather and other books my father brought into the house (book of the month club and other means of getting books in a small town). I’m probably scarred for life. I also got to go to the The Godfather movie at around that age, even though it was rate R. Bad parents I guess.
I think the real question is if the issue is truly about portrayals of graphic sex in any form, why are there zero graphic novels with depictions of hetero sex on the Texas legislature’s proposed banned list? Because there are plenty of them out there. The answer, to me, is because people are just using the 3 pornographic cartoons in a book such as Gender Queer (and let’s be clear, we are talking about cartoons, not Hustler) out of 280 pages of material as an excuse to ban a book which contains a message and values with which they disagree.
To make it worse, unlike me, I’m sure few of the parents who want it banned actually took the time to read it and think through the content. Lord knows it’s far easier to forward a screenshot of one or two inflammatory pages than is it to consider different perspectives. One also has to weigh the book in context. We’re talking about 3 cartoons out of 280 pages, where the rest of the book is quite powerful and moving for a group of people who don’t have access in the school library to many, if any, books that they feel speak to them. I don’t think it has to be all or nothing, yet I also have no doubt that if the compromise proposed was to blackout or remove just those 3 images, most of the people who want it banned would still want it banned.
If there is one thing I have learned in watching school board meetings over the years, it’s that you will never make everyone happy. So who do you listen to? If parents really want to control all aspects of their children’s education, they need to home school or find a private school that aligns with their beliefs.
There have definitely been some ideas that have not worked in schools- it seems that you didn’t escape it, even in private school. I remember my D’s teacher was supposed to teach diagramming sentences- she had never been taught! I think that’s why teachers in the classroom should really be involved since they have to implement these things.
Agreed. People talk a lot about “parental rights” but I have yet to read anything about responsibility. As in, what about society’s responsibility to educate its youth? To expose them to a diversity of thought?
I can think of nothing worse than this bizarre notion floating about the Zeitgeist right now that parents should be the ones who control school curricula and libraries. Parents are, on average, ill-equipped to make these decisions. Alas, this country has lost respect for education, expertise, and experts.
We were told we were wrong to take our elementary and middle school kids to hear Paul Rusesabagina speak (Rwandan Civil War - Hotel Rwanda manager). Our kids were moved by it. I think it’s good to shape young lives by letting them know about the real world - even when it’s ugly. They certainly didn’t become ugly because they heard him speak. They became aware of the world and wanted to do their part to make it a better place.
That would sound ridiculous if it was generalized:
I can think of nothing worse than this bizarre notion floating about the Zeitgeist right now that voters should be the ones who control government programs and priorities. Voters are, on average, ill-equipped to make these decisions. Alas, this country has lost respect for bureaucrats, expertise, and experts.
Representative democracy means that you pick representatives who are hopefully less “ill-equipped” than the “average” voter. But it does mean that those representatives get to decide, hopefully taking advice from “experts” but not delegating those decisions to them. Why should elected school boards be any different?
Parents could possess a diversity of knowledge base that teachers don’t which could be valuable in informing curriculum in specific areas.
For example would a student learn more about Hinduism from a parent who was an immigrant from South Asia and a practicing Hindu or the schools Religious education teacher who is a Christian and who’s only knowledge of Hinduism was from college courses?
Or what about a working electricians knowledge of the electromagnetic physics theory involved in their jobs ?
Classes can have guest speakers for topics where the guest speakers have expertise that the regular instructor does not.
Of course, if the regular instructor does not have expertise in the subject, vetting the guest speaker to avoid getting one promoting fringe but not disclosed as such opinions on the subject may be difficult. Or where the guest speaker may be “triggered” by certain types of questions (in your example, how would such a guest speaker answer a question about caste discrimination and the treatment of Dalits?).
Absolutely. H used to come in once or twice a year to talk with math classes about becoming an engineer. They had a “math career day” and he was just one presenter.
He’ll be the first to tell you teaching isn’t a gift of his and he wants no part of it as a “job.”
In a perfect world two very different view points could be verbalised transparently and the audience makes their own conclusions. That’s the strength of diversity of Ideas in a classroom but requires the risk of being triggered, which no group is immune to.
I don’t want school boards determining curricula, either.
Experts (no need for snarky quotes, since they are experts, sorry) with PhDs and decades of experience in their field should determine school curricula, health policies, reading lists, etc. not local, part-time school board members who have to pander to the most vociferous parents, nor legislators who tend to be even more partisan. Claiming “nothing can be divorced from politics” only becomes a truism if you allow it. Other democracies have figured out how to do it just fine.
What’s ridiculous is me having to listen at school board meetings to parents who failed 10th grade biology opine about epidemiology, parents who can’t spell law school pretending to understand critical theory, and parents who haven’t read a book since the 90s talking about what books should and shouldn’t be read by students.
Again, the problem is a loss of respect for experts and expertise by the segment of the population that fails to grasp that not all opinions are created equal.
Because by and large, the “elected officials” are not running the nuts and bolts programs. We don’t expect elected officials to run the country’s medical establishment–they may propose policy, but it better be based on the input from those personnnel educated in medicine who actually know medicine. That’s why scientists and doctors run the NIH, CDC, etc. We don’t elect people to do that.
Similarly, elected officials may have opinions about education, but we don’t expect them to run the Education department. Mostly (with some recent exceptions), they choose professional educators to help them decide and implement policy.
So, no, the opinions of parents on what constitutes education in the public universe are not paramount, no matter who they elect.
As I recently read somewhere, public education does not exist for the whims or expectations or preferences of parents, but rather for the benefit of the public community. If that’s not what parents want, they can take their kids to private school, and decide through their dollars what they want.
Not joking here at all, but would you mind listing the names of some of those books? If there is a double standard on allowing porn in libraries that is hetero, but only banning gay porn, then I’d like to know that.
I was pretty involved in school. I saw reading lists, I looked up books. Did I raise an eyebrow at a few- yes. Did I stop my kids from reading them- no. Was there mature content- yes. Did it make my kids uncomfortable- in a way. Did it teach them about the world-yes. Were they scarred for life- no.
I don’t think the majority of parents who are wanting the books banned have even read them. They were pulled in by what I like to call the get you mad media. FB or wherever they get their news. Politicians love this- it riles up the base. Media/websites love it- more clicks. This can happen on both sides. Meanwhile the kids are the losers. There are kids in our school who are holocaust deniers and people are banning books about the holocaust because of language and a naked mouse??? There’s another place where Maus is banned… Russia.
I feel like I am in some bad version of Footloose and we are all stuck in that town. I hate to tell Gen X- we comprise a very small part of our population- we can very easily be outvoted.