Originally published at: Unable to burn digital books, Orange Unified School District bans the whole virtual library | Boing Boing
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When does denying a child access to information become a form of abuse?
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The headline made me hope that this was Orange County, Florida, not the county I call home. Sigh…
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I think this is grandstanding. It is further reckless behavior that throws our district into chaos.
That’s the ultimate goal of the GOP. How are they going to win future elections if schools function properly?
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Unfortunately, Orange county has a long history of conservative activism. Lisa McGirr wrote a great book on that…
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I was sent to a ‘conservative’ church school for my sixth-grade year. We were assigned to write book reports. I chose HG Wells’ OUTLINE OF HISTORY and was threatened with expulsion because Wells supported evolutionary theory, conflicting with the church’s creationist doctrine.
The book was not banned but its contents were. Yikes.
Do book-burnings lead to burning authors at the stake? Is censorship always backed with violence? Is literacy subversive?
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When they’re in their 30s and can finally afford therapy and realize their trust and relationship issues are because their parents infantilized them and tried to control their perception of the world around them.
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What Heine said.
And points for the SMAC reference! I still think its Faction characteristics and social engineering choices made it one of the best implementations of a Civ-style game, as well as videos like this.
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At the start of my Middle (Junior High) School days, I scored well on IQ tests and was put in the district’s advanced program, which included an adult card for the city library. Reading all those ‘adult’ books as I entered puberty surely accounts for my wild & crazy adulthood, right? /s
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It’s just so weird to get in a moral panic about a book in a library that was “available” to children, even inappropriately. I mean, even if everyone can agree it’s wildly inappropriate, the kids still need to a) know it’s there, and b) actually want to read it, which frankly they almost certainly won’t.
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What was the difference between an “adult” and “child” library card?
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Also, to quote-from-memory a view on the censorship debate: “When I was a child, my parents showed me what the bleach bottle looked like, where it was kept, and told me what would happen if I drank it. They didn’t hide it and hope I didn’t find it.”
edit: clarity
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The difference: What books could be checked out – I could range beyond the kiddy room and chew into mainstream SciFi et al…
Also, the ability to borrow other media like paintings, films, and LP records. I listened to Hawai’ian language lessons, performances of Shaw plays, comedy and history recordings – much besides music. I often rode home with art works and records in my bike basket. Kewl!
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I was a voracious reader and exhausted the chidren’s library science and science fiction sections at a young age. The children’s library finally got fed up getting me individual books or access to the adult reference room at the adult library (required an interbranch transfer to be filled out or some such, and the adult branch was right upstairs). I was in Grade 5 or 6. They would only let me take ‘adult’ books out for about 10 days at a time until I qualified for an early issue Adult card. Nobody ever attempted to limit the subject matter of what I read.
These Xtianist bigots terrify me. As the student quoted above said, none of the book banners have ever been remembered as the ‘good guys’.
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Ever see that M. Night Shyamalan movie The Village about a community that goes through extraordinary lengths to raise their own children to believe they are living in a remote 19th Century village in order to protect them from the “evils” of the outside world?
I think that’s the level of pious ignorance these assholes are going for.
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Banning books and closing libraries are brilliant examples of what I call:
Meme Based Governance (MBG).
Meme Based Governance can be defined as: the use of governmental autocratic fiats, laws, or rulings which are primarily guided by or derived from meme(s) favored by the politician’s political base.
See also:
Meme Based Politics
Meme Based Political Platform
Meme Based Strategy
Meme Based Tactics
Meme Based Outreach
etc.
It’s called oppression. Book banning was certainly a thing before the internet and the rise of meme-based politics.
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