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If that's not the issue, then please explain how this law would prevent librarians from curating away books they don't like, and if it wouldn't, please explain how that state of affairs would be superior to having it done by the majority of parents.
Presumably that would mean I'm living in a school district that is majority Marxist. Aside from the fact that at that point I'd have far bigger problems than the school library, yes I would be
a lot more ok with that than having these decision made by a single librarian., actually forget about "a lot more than" I'd be ok with it without qualification. Communities have a right to maintain their culture. If Marxville wants a library full of Marx, it's their right.It also looks like you were trying to address the other part of my comment but didn't get around to it?
The point is that, in the absence of the law, libraries will not simply be able to remove books with views they don't like; they will have the right to do so. In contrast, if the law is passed, they risk losing funding or worse if they do so. Will it absolutely prevent them from doing so? No, just as laws against murder do not absolutely prevent murders.
You are avoiding the issue. The issue is not by whom it should be done, but rather whether it is ok with it being done at all.
No, there was just a formatting problem. I have edited it for clarity.
Sorry, but I'm not willing to give away the option to prevent flooding the library with propaganda on the vague promise that it will be "risky" to do so. Yes, a situation where parents have the right to control the libraries, rather than just librarians, is far superior.
I addressed it in the edit.
Well, we will have to agree to disagree, because I see that as deeply improper. And, as Justice Alito has correctly noted, 'The public schools are invaluable and beneficent institutions, but they are, after all, organs of the State." Morse v. Frederick, 551 US 393, 424 (2007). That is true regardless of whether decisions are made by librarians or parents.
Which is precisely why parents should have the right to veto propaganda taught in schools - it amounts to the state indoctrinating their children.
Sorry, I misread your previous reply. It seems that you agree that indoctrination is bad; if that is the case, then I do not understand why you oppose a law that prevents indoctrination. Because, to clarify, once the plurality opinion in Pico is overruled, which is inevitable given the Court's subsequent government speech jurisprudence, schools will be free to engage in indoctrination by removing all books that conflict with the majority view.
You got a lot more wrong about my opinion in this reply than the other.
I'm not against indoctrination.
The law does not prevent it. In fact it is either impossible to do so, or would result in a nonfunctional society.
I'm completely fine with the majority of parents in a community deciding what values are taught and what is prevented from being taught.
FC beat me to the punch, and I agree with everything he said, so feel free to check his comment for justifications.
Then see my previous response re having to agree to disagree.
Disagreement is all fine and well, but I'd appreciate it if you didn't portray your proposal as some conciliatory bipartisan idea, that we all should agree to. It's radical and hostile.
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Indoctrinating children with their parents' values is good, and the public schools were created to facilitate this process, via government systems that likewise exist to serve the parents.
Indoctrinating children with values their parents consider alien and evil is bad, and is directly counter to the purpose of both the schools in particular and government systems generally.
Neither the government nor the schools have a valid interest in what children are taught. The valid interest begins and ends with that of the parents, who institute the schools and the government to pursue that interest. To the extent that we do not like what some subset of the parents want to teach, that is not a problem either the schools or the government are capable of handling. Attempting to set up either the schools or the government to correct such a problem is an entirely doomed effort, leading to inevitable failure and numerous harmful effects.
You cannot write a law that "prevents indoctrination" in a system that exists to indoctrinate. There is no neutral viewpoint. What you can do is constrain the actions of a common-benefit system to the areas where broad consensus on common benefit exists, and that is what you should in fact do.
None of this should need to be explained. You do not own my kids. I do own my kids, modulo a few extremely limited caveats that I and most other parents will be more than happy to vociferously un-concede if you try to use them as a beachhead for the undermining of our parental duties and rights.
Do you have kids?
Yeah, this is the same nonsense that I heard from some colleagues when I was teaching: "It is impossible to be completely neutral; therefore, it is fine to indoctrinate my students in my personal political views." No, it isn't: A teacher, and a school, are perfectly capable of exposing students to varying views on issues, including those with which they disagree. I did it all the time: "Here is a very common argument on one side of this issue. Here is a common argument on the other side."
It is exactly the same. Schools exist for a purpose: to educate, to shape, to indoctrinate children, preparing them to take on the mantle of adulthood within their communities. Classroom instruction and libraries are two methods of serving that same end. Differences in method are not differences in purpose, and it is the purpose I am pointing to.
It is categorically impossible to serve individual parents' individual interests through a public school system, and no part of the existing school system attempts to do so, ever has, or ever will. Public schooling is an industrial process, not an art. Every facet of every school program is aimed at general categories of students, and serves the needs of specific students to the exact extent that they fit the general model. If students receive additional, personalized attention, they receive it because teachers as individuals provide it to them on their individual initiative. The system neither requires nor enforces such attention, nor should it, nor can it. There is no way to codify interested care for another individual.
To the extent that such depersonalized methods can serve parents' interests, it is because parents share interests as a group. To the extent that values-drift results in fewer shared interests, public schools make a lot less sense than they used to. It is hard to imagine how you could think otherwise. Do you likewise think the police have a duty to protect individual citizens?
No, they do not. The federal bureaucracy and the teacher pipeline it accredits are two intertwined systems, among a great many others, that local parents have zero influence over despite their overwhelming impact over the school systems those parents must use. Gender ideology has entered the schools top-down from national-level government and pseudo-government organs, not bottom-up from parents electing school boards to implement it, which is why fucking lying to parents about it as official school policy, and media policy, and local, state and national government policy has become a central aspect of this fight. It is true that some parents in some areas have accepted this imposition, and with varying degrees of enthusiasm. That does not change the fundamental aspect of policy arbitrage that runs through this entire issue: lie to people about what you're doing, and get as much as possible accomplished before common knowledge of the lies is established. Hence, on this issue in particular, school boards objecting to people reading from the books they've stocked the library with at their official meetings with their constituents.
If I understand you correctly, you think we should be having a debate over whether or not something is biased or neutral, acceptable or unacceptable. I have zero faith that such debates can be productively carried out in any principled sense. Either the majority sets policy in accord with their interests, or we're better off not having a policy. There is never going to be a neutral way to enforce the interests of the minority on the majority, my own minority interests most of all. Separation is the best possible outcome. When issues like this one become a debate, the system is already a write-off.
Your colleagues at least have the virtue of being honest about their intentions. If you do not share my values, I do not trust you to engage with those values honestly enough to be paid out of my pocket to teach my children about them. If you are not teaching my children about them, I see no reason for you to bring them up. If this makes it impossible to teach a thing, then maybe you shouldn't be teaching it. Again, none of this should be surprising in any way.
...And of course, none of this solves the problem of teachers pretending that their politics are simply objective fact, as they do and have ceaselessly for decades, as all authorities in the educational pipeline insist they must. Sadly, policy arbitrage is a reality, and the normies haven't caught on yet that the system as a whole is designed end-to-end by ideologues acting in bad faith. Baby steps.
"A teacher" and perhaps even "a school" may be capable of doing so, in the same sense that "a man" with a severed spine is capable of summiting Everest. I have seen zero evidence that "teachers" and "schools" in the general sense even intend to try, and absolute mountains of evidence that they consider neutrality to be cooperation with evil.
I am not terribly confident you did it well. If you did do it well, I am not terribly confident that it added significant value to your teaching. If you did it well and it added significant value to your teaching, I am extremely skeptical that this was a codifiable output of the system employing you, rather than of your own virtues. Hostile indoctrination by the educational system is an obvious, severe threat to everything I value. There is no reason to allow gaps in the defense against that threat in pursuit of nebulous and likely illusory benefits of the sort you are advocating.
[EDIT] - And one more time, none of this should be at all surprising. Arguments over bias have been a fixture of the culture wars for most of both of our lives. Those arguments have never resulted in an actual solution to bias, anywhere, ever. If you think such a solution can be practically secured, you ought to explain what you'll do different than every previous attempt.
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