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It is impossible to completely serve individual parents' interests, but which comes closer: 1) permitting the majority to remove all library books that express ideas with which they disapprove; or 2) forbidding that? Obviously, the latter.
Yes, yes, and what does that have to do with the topic at hand? As I said, parents elect school boards, and school boards set curriculum, and candidates routinely pledge to eliminate "bad" ideas and then do so through altering curriculum. If they also remove books expressing views they dislike, then "parents" are indeed "the government" and are engaging in precisely the destruction of individual parental interests that you claim to be concerned with.
That's why the minority needs the books to be kept, because those books are written by them, from their perspective.
I don't know why you are talking about values. I am talking about political and economic ideas. An Econ teacher can teach "markets bad," or they can teach "here are the benefits and drawbacks of the market." A teacher can teach, "crime is caused by racism" or they can teach "here are several common theories about the causes of crime."
Which is why it is important for teachers to always present opposing views. It really is not that hard. Can it be done perfectly? No, which I already said. But that does not mean there is no duty to try as best as possible.
And, the last time you walked into a classroom was? Teachers can get fired for ignoring curriculum policy, including policy on controversial issues. And, again, the issue is what teachers and schools should be doing; your position of "the majority of parents can silence all ideas they don't like" is hardly going to improve the problem.
Just wanted to jump in on this. Can you step me through how this changes anything at all in rthe argument? At the moment it feels like you're hoping that making some semantic readjustments to what we said will get us to see something, I think it would be a lot more productive if you just engaged with the substance.
If it is true that giving parents control over school libraries makes them "the government", all that means is that I want the parents to become "the government". If this parental government destroys individual parental interest, it is because all governments always destroy individual interests. Our arguments never relied on protecting individual interests.
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No, it is impossible to serve their individual interests at all. Only their group interests can be served, because the system, like all abstract policy-based systems, only recognizes groups and classes, not individuals.
No, obviously the former.
If individual parents want their kids to have a book, they are free to supply their own kids with that book. If parents don't want specific books in the communal library, there is zero public interest in those books being in that library. The library cannot contain all books. The library is a public institution, intended for the impartial service of all, paid for by the taxes of all. To the greatest extent possible, it should contain only the things that everyone agrees on, which is a content pool many orders of magnitude larger than its shelves can contain. Such institutions were created in a time when such broad agreement could be assumed; the loss of such agreement is yet another consequence of chronic defection against our social commons. Not getting a book you want placed in limited public space with limited public money because more of the people with an equal right to that space and who pay an equal share of that money don't want it there is not a legitimate harm. If you want the book, you can buy it yourself. If people start weaponizing such objections to strip all books from the library, then maybe a library isn't a thing you should have.
No one has a right to use public money to express and amplify their personal views or values. That this principle is routinely ignored by various governmental and pseudo-governmental organs is a travesty.
Because parents controlling what their children are taught is a good thing, and parents not being able to do that is a bad thing. Since parents can't all agree perfectly on a curriculum, we go with the points of unanimous consent. Where we need to go outside unanimous consent, the majority should rule. If majority rule is repugnant, it is because something is being shown that parents want not to be shown, and not because parents are unable to show something that they want to show. Parents can show whatever they want to their own kids. They have zero legitimate interest in showing things to other parents' kids over those parents' objections. Speaking collectively, neither teachers nor the bureaucrats behind them have any special insight into rearing children superior to that of parents. If the parents do not want their kid exposed to something, the school has zero legitimate interest to say otherwise.
Yes, and this is entirely acceptable.
Parents acting through their local government are less "the government" than the unaccountable bureaucratic institutions fighting those parents for control of the curricula with those parents' own tax dollars.
There is no right to having a school library at all. No parent has a valid interest in ensuring that their prefered books are featured in such a library. The library is for the interests people hold in common, not for the interests of individuals. Nor is satisfying such an interest possible; there are too many different people with too many different opinions. Neither school libraries nor schools themselves are platforms for the presentation of one's personal views. They are shared institutions. They are supposed to be neutral. The only practical approach to neutrality when it comes to a field as varied and charged as books is subtractive. If subtraction results in an empty library, that is an acceptable outcome.
Public school libraries do not exist to spotlight particular minority perspectives. No common interest is served by doing so.
You are trying to present this as protection for minorities, but I know that my minority interests will never be protected by the principles you are appealing to. School libraries in NYC absolutely are not going to stock back-issues of Guns & Ammo, or allow students to watch Brandon Herrera or Garand Thumb or Demolition Ranch on the library computers. My religious views are of course entirely verboten, and many of my political views are banned as hate speech or for fostering a hostile environment or for making people feel "unsafe" or any of a thousand other workarounds to the vaunted principles of tolerance. I know that this has a roughly zero percent chance of changing in any way in my lifetime. Consequently, I have zero interest in taking your appeals seriously. If your principle cannot be implemented in general, and it evidently cannot, it isn't worth a damn. Given that I cannot get protection where I am a minority, I do not concede to such protections when I am in the majority. Why should I do otherwise?
Values are where political and economic ideas come from, and values are why some people are trying to put these books in the libraries, and many more people are trying to keep them out. It hardly matters, though; the same reasoning applies to the ideas as well. If you think my ideas are garbage, it would be very foolish of me to pay you to teach them. I would rather you be silent than use my money to advocate against me, openly or not, subtly or not, consciously or not.
You provide a number of examples of how a teacher can teach both sides. My answer to them all is the same: I would be a fool to trust teachers to do this in a fair and neutral fashion, so I do not want them doing it at all. Atheists felt the same way about "teaching the controversy" when the issue was teaching evolution, if I recall correctly. Were they wrong then?
Sure. And my expectation is that those who teach "crime is caused by bad individual choices" probably have worse career outcomes at a statistically-significant rate. I know that my prefered version will never be allowed to be taught, so I have no interest in other peoples' fictions being taught instead, even as part of a variety sampler.
If parents get together and enact law restricting you from doing so, it is your duty not to do so. If your claim is that teachers can and should produce liberal tolerance and a charitable urbanity in their students, I invite you to examine the world around you. Either they cannot or they absolutely will not; it hardly matters which.
Teachers cannot be trusted to do this. It is better to give them an official script and demand that they stick to it. It is better still to fence off broad topics that they are not allowed to talk about. Certainly there are no shortage of such fences for me at every office I've worked in.
Well, probably a couple months ago when I was volunteering to teach art and bible classes, but presumably you mean in a formal, institutional setting. Longer since then; I get my impressions from the news, and from the friends and family members who teach in public and private schools and at the college level. And of course, my taxes pay for the system in question, whether I want them to or not. I do not believe that my impression of teachers and school environments generally is inaccurate.
Yes, and that is a good thing. Public school teachers have zero legitimate interest in engaging in controversy. They are not generally equipped to do so competently, and their performance in their actual job does not benefit from them doing so. No legitimate right is trampled by preventing them from doing so; not their right, not the parents' right, not the students' right, because none of those rights exist.
I disagree. The problem is that the educational apparatus has engaged in large-scale, sustained defection, using public resources for partisan advocacy at the cost of their core mission. I am not worried that parents will try to stop teachers from teaching math, and any parents stupid enough to do so deserve what they get. I am worried that teachers will continue to use their position and the public resources they've been granted to indoctrinate children with values hostile to my own. Parents being able to silence the teaching of all ideas they don't like is pretty close to lossless for me, since all the ideas I'd personally like to see taught are banned anyway, and the objective, obviously valuable stuff that the school exists exclusively to teach won't be getting banned. I do not recognize a downside.
Public schools do not exist to unlock each child's unique potential. People who believe they do have been deceived, by themselves or by others. Public schools exist to allow parents to work without a kid underfoot, and to teach the kids basic, generic skills at a minimal level. They routinely fail at even this minimal objective. There is no reason to pretend that any higher goal is being pursued through official policy, though individual teachers will always be free to go above and beyond. There is reason to ensure that those teachers who want to go "above and beyond" do not neglect their core mission or violate parents' trust in doing so, which they have done quite frequently.
It is also trivially easy to put one's thumb on the scale. I have some experience teaching the young, and engaging in adjacent activities. I am therefore aware that teaching is fundamentally manipulative.
...In what way is it respecting the "rights of students and parents" to teach the students something a majority of the parents don't want you to teach them? Again, it is impossible for all topics to be covered equally, or even for all topics to be covered at all. Individual parents do not have a right to have their particular and peculiar topics or interests covered. Certainly mine are not part of the standard curriculum. The curriculum is for everyone, so it should include the things everyone agrees it should include, and it should not include things whose inclusion is contentious. If such things must be considered, putting it to a majority vote is an entirely reasonable solution, if an imperfect one. Demanding that minority views get inclusion over the objection of the majority is impossible to implement fairly, and repugnant when implemented unfairly. Doing so has nothing to do with "respecting the rights of parents and students", since the rights purportedly being respected do not exist and could not ever be satisfied if they did.
This is empirically false. Virtually every school permits parents to opt their children out of certain lessons, particularly sex ed, and many permit parents to have their children read alternative books if they do not approve of a particular book assigned in class.
This is not germane to what I said, which is that one comes closer than the other.
Yes, it is, but again that is not germane to the issue, which is that when a majority of parents get together to do that, they are acting as the government. It is not different than if the voters of a local district passed an initiative doing the same thing.
And so instead you would prefer that teachers tell students that your views are wrong? That makes little sense. You are making the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Yes, they were. Evolution, and all science (eg, heliocentrism v geocentrism) should be taught by giving students the major interpretations and the evidence, and let them figure out which is correct. They will come to the correct conclusion, because evidence, and they will learn the material better.
I said they can be fired for ignoring policy on controversial issues, not "engaging in controversy." Talking about controversial issues is unavoidable in economics, government/civics, and history, and I assume some areas of science where there are unresolved questions.
Right. And if you are worried about that, don't you want to preserve the possibility that your child will find alternative ideas when they browse the stacks of their school library? Or do you instead want those pernicious ideas to be reinforced every time your child goes there? I honestly do not understand how your conclusion follows from your premise.
???? And, they pursue that neutrality by removing books with which they disagree? You have been arguing against neutrality this entire time.
I reiterate: 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 applicable general model.
The class in question in both these cases is "parents with moral objections to a subject", a class large and vociferous enough that it got its own specific policy carve-outs. These and all other policies are designed for general classes of people, and they serve people to the extent they fit neatly inside those classes. This is the entire point of policy as a concept. We use it to try to maximize fairness and efficiency. When individuals don't fit neatly, we try to shoehorn them in to the existing class categories, and if that results in poor service, we generally don't care much. If they won't fit at all, we either dismiss their concerns or bypass policy, generally with a statement about "person X objected to Y, but the school is required by policy to do Z..." Every facet of public schooling demonstrates this simple reality, from class sizes to curricula to teacher standards to classroom discipline, grading and so on.
The fact remains that schools are not and cannot be designed to satisfy the interests of individuals, only those of general classes, as is necessary and proper for common-use public infrastructure.
School libraries do not exist to enable self-expression. Neither parents, teachers, librarians nor students have a valid interest in expressing themselves through the book selection in the library, individually or as a class. The school library is not a public forum any more than the classroom is. Parents do have a valid interest in their kids improving their reading skills, and learning to read for pleasure is an excellent way to secure that interest, but that interest can be satisfied by any text that holds their attention. No specific text is necessary, and they do not have a valid interest in exposing other parents' kids to material those parents find objectionable.
It is entirely possible to satisfy their legitimate interest exclusively with books no one objects to their kids having access to, so we should do that. No legitimate interest is harmed by doing so. If book selection becomes so contentious that no books are available, then libraries are not a good idea any more.
I would rather try to prevent them from speaking on such subjects at all, and I think it is vastly easier and more practical to do so than it is to get them to speak fairly.
Government enabling the education of children is a good thing.
Government helping parents to control what their children are exposed to is a good thing.
Government exposing kids to material over their parents' objections is a bad thing.
Government helping some parents exposing other parents' kids to material over those parents objections is a bad thing.
Requiring unanimous consent for all material is an entirely fair and practical method of achieving the legitimate goals of a school library, provided people engage in good faith. If they are not willing to engage in good faith, then it is better not to have a library at all than to allow it to serve as a partisan weapon to be fought over.
And once again, this is already how it works for me, and always has, and always will. Many things I think should be in the library absolutely will not be allowed in the library, because other parents find them objectionable. I accept their veto. They must accept mine. There is no reason I can see to argue otherwise.
On a practical level, I simply do not believe that is a thing that is going to happen. I see no reason to accept entirely concrete harms in pursuit of purely theoretical benefits. Hatred of and discrimination against my values and interests is too firmly rooted to be overcome in this lifetime. The school is not going to do a good job teaching my kid about the controversial ideas I wish to impart to them, so I am resigned to handling that part of their education myself. Others should do likewise, and the school should be constrained to serving the general interests we all hold in common as much as possible. That is the best possible outcome, given the realities of the situation.
The fact is that subtractive fairness is simpler and much more practical to achieve then additive fairness, much easier to protect from bad-faith actions, and its fail-state is strongly preferable. All of these are commendable virtues when setting policy for a system I cannot trust to treat me fairly or to pursue my interests in good faith.
In the classroom, it is easier to achieve fairness by enforcing silence than through mandating speech, so I would prefer that we enforce silence.
In the library, it is easier to achieve fairness by removing books than it is by adding them, so I would prefer we enforce removing them.
In either case, trusting a system I know is hostile to act in good faith toward me is a very foolish idea.
There is a right to protect your child from influences you consider harmful.
There is a right to access of public services.
There is no right to an audience for your personal views.
There is absolutely no right to requiring the recipients of a public service as an audience for your personal views.
Censorship is not indoctrination. Requiring silence on a subject or the removal of a book is not equivalent to requiring speech on a subject, or that students be allowed to access a book. Removing books from a library violates no right of parents, teachers, librarians or students, because they have no right to access any particular book nor any particular class of books.
Once more, this is already how it works for me. Materials I think should be accessible are already banned, and nothing you say or do, no argument you make or law you propose will change that.
If this is what the court held, then the court is wrong. There is no "regime of voluntary inquiry" in public school libraries, nor in libraries generally. Curation and censorship is and always has been the norm. That censorship should be enforced equitably, rather than being a political prize for the librarians and whichever groups or individuals they personally favor.
Yes.
"The library only contains books that no one has objected to" is a neutral system.
"The library contains books a majority has not voted to remove" is less neutral, but reasonably acceptable.
"The library contains books people want in it, with their selections filtered by the judgement of the librarians" is less neutral than either of the above.
I've been arguing that the system is not neutral, and that additive neutrality is some combination of impractical and impossible. Not everyone can have their favorite books in the library because there is not enough room. Not everyone will be allowed to have their favorite book in the library, because the system is loaded with bias. Since we cannot allow all books, and we cannot prevent people removing others' books because they personally object to them, the fairest solution is that everyone gets to remove books, and the next best alternative is that the majority gets to remove books. Subtractive neutrality is the best possible route to a more neutral system. I suffer its drawbacks just as strongly as any other would, and find them tolerable. I am not asking anyone else to accept things that I myself do not accept. That is the best neutrality that you can ask for.
Whatever the merits might be of that argument in some contexts, in the contexts of removals of books which are currently on library shelves, it amounts to a claim that the majority has the right to silence the views of the minority. Which they don't.
Neither the minority nor the majority have any right to expression of their views in this context, because the library is not a public forum for the expression of views.
The books got on shelves because people chose to put them there, pursuant to a public service. That public service is helping kids improve their reading skills, and perhaps, maybe, their general knowledge. Excluding specific books or even topics of books that some consider objectionable compromises neither of those goals. It does compromise the ability of individuals or groups to see their views represented, but no group, whether majority or minority, has any right to have their views presented at all.
The library cannot present all views, because space is limited.
The library will not present all views, because it is run by humans, and humans are biased.
The library should not present all views, because many of the parents the library exists to serve consider exposure a wide variety of views to be harmful.
Presentation and non-presentation are not equivalent, and non-presentation is by necessity the default.
The desire for presentation can be satisfied elsewhere. The desire for protection cannot; there is no way to un-expose a kid.
Majorities getting their way over minorities is the basis for our entire system, and the will of the majority is overridden only when doing so preserves some necessary right. There is no necessary right being preserved here, but even if there were, the better solution would be to simply allow anyone, majority or minority, group or individual, to exclude whichever books they wish. Allowing anyone to add whichever books they want is not possible, and allowing the majority to pick the books would be less fair than allowing the majority to exclude books, for the reasons stated above.
They absolutely do, have and will. As I have pointed out repeatedly, books I think should be in school libraries absolutely are not allowed in school libraries, for exactly the reasons stated above. I do not object when this principle cuts against me, and you have presented no realistic alternative, because there is no realistic alternative. You can't un-bias the system, and you can't give libraries infinite space. You are not engaging with either limitation in any principled fashion.
Because you are talking about something different. There is a difference between 1) not going out of your way to provide the means for someone who wants to speak; and 2) silencing someone who is already speaking.
When there is no right to speak at all, silencing people for speaking at the expense of the proper function of a system is entirely reasonable. The people in question here did not have a right to start speaking, and indeed doing so was a defection against the commons. Using public resources to advertise your personal ideology or to expose other people's kids to media their parents do not wish them exposed to is unacceptable behavior. Preventing people from doing so is the norm, and always has been. When people violate these norms, there is no requirement to allow them to continue to do so because they are "already speaking". The fact that they are "speaking" where they should not is exactly the reason it is good to stop them.
You are claiming they have a right to continue speaking. This implies they had a right to begin speaking. I know that I do not enjoy such a right, so I do not believe they enjoy it either. If this is "something different", I do not see how.
[EDIT] - Maybe I'm wrong! Maybe school libraries are a forum for speech. If they are, how do I get my prefered material into them? As I've mentioned previously, I think students should have access to gun culture media. Can you describe a plausible way for me to get back issues of Guns & Ammo magazine into public school libraries in New York City? If there's a right to speech, what is the plausible procedure by which I can access that right? It can't be down to the Librarian's choice, because they are a public employee and have no right to use their platform for personal or partisan promotion; we pay them to do a job, and we can absolutely specify exactly how we want that job performed. It has to be the parents or the kids, right? So if I'm a parent, how do I get my stuff stocked in the library, over the objections of the other parents, staff, etc?
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And what will you do if they don't come to the correct conclusion? Are you going to let them go out into the world believing the Earth is flat or is 6000 years old, or are you going to start tweaking the materials and classes until they reach the right conclusion? If you start tweaking them, are you going to restrain yourself only to the subject where we can reasonably believe that there even is a correct answer, and we know it, will subjects with more controversies and more unknowns also be subject to such tweaks?
Why do you cut out the part of his comment where his reasoning is explained in detail, and then act like you don't understand where he's coming from?
Since I have repeatedly argued the opposite, no.
I didn't. Let's review: My initial proposal was to codify Pico, so that schools cannot remove books on the basis that they include ideas that the school disagrees with. it seems to me that one can hardly oppose that idea on the ground that "libraries are supposed to be neutral."
What if you're discussing geocentrism, and they're a smartass that compulsively reads internet contrarians, and ends up making a compelling case that all the laws of physics can be reformulated into a system where the Earth is at the (0,0,0) coordinate, he's good enough with Math that his presentation is compelling to the less advanced students, and since your background is law you're caught on the back foot, and the entire class ends up believing the Earth is the center of the universe?
The issue I have here is that I heard that promise before. This was the framework I supposedly grew up on, and it fell apart the very moment this free access to ideas started leading to the "wrong" conclusions. Even if you have the integrity to keep your promise, I have zero trust that the education establishment does.
You did. Yes, let's.
Here is the sentence you quoted:
Here is the paragraph where the sentence comes from:
He's saying you can't be neutral in the sense you're advocating for (either being "objective" or "teaching the controversy"), and that the only way to do so is holding on to the bits that everybody agrees on. In another part of the comment he says:
What is it that you don't understand about that, and why are you acting like he didn't explain it?
I am not sure why I am teaching a science class if my background is in law, but if I were, then I would bring in a subject matter expert. And if that doesn't work, oh well. As I have said, there is no guarantee that students will learn a given lesson. All one can do is choose the best pedagogy, and as I said, the best pedagogy is to give students the evidence, not to tell them, "this is what scientist say is true." Finally, the problem of the smartass would be exactly the same in either case: Suppose I just give a lecture on "this is what scientists say," and the same smartass raises his hand and raises the same point?
So, the better alternative is to tell the education establishment that it is OK to silence all opposing views? I do not understand why that would be the case. That is exactly what I pointed out previously: My former colleague, who argued that, because perfect objectivity is impossible, it is fine for him to simply give students his one-sided (and very left wing) views and ignore all opposing views.
Yet, he also says, "they are supposed to be neutral." So, which is it?
You were teaching the age of the Earth a second ago, so where's the problem? Anyway, I haven't noticed Math / Science teachers having that great understanding of Math / Science so that changes little.
The difference is that I'm only exposed to the particular topics the smartass bothers to raise his hand about, and "shut up and eat your french fries" remains a valid response, while you've committed to going down every conceivable rabbit hole, even when no one is interested in it.
Given that me, and FC have provided many arguments for how it would be the case, it would be a lot more productive if you explained which part you don't understand. Yes, it would be far superior for a local majority to be able to silence all opposing views. Generally, a direct, localized, transparent, democratic censorship process, in the hands of the parents is better than an indirect, opaque, non-democratic censorship process, that pretends to not even be a censorship process.
I'm happy to rephrase it as many times as it takes, but it would probably be a good idea if you didn't ignore the part of the comment that directly addresses your questions. Again, according to FC there are 2 ways to understand neutrality:
The "objective" / "teach the controversy" one. This one is not possible.
The "subtractive" one, where you get rid of the things people disagree about, until only the ones everyone agrees on remain. There are some caveats to this that FC mentioned, but broadly speaking this one is possible.
It doesn't matter, and the Supreme Court is wrong. First, as already pointed out, there will always be curation, and it is better that the school library reflects community values than the librarian's values. Second, I don't even believe the person who wrote that. I'm sure they could come up with a post-hoc justification for not doing it, but they've made a fully-general case for stacking the school's book shelves full of porn.
It's perfectly possible to only teach theories everyone agrees are plausible, and if people can't agree on that, not teaching social science is a perfectly valid alternative. This is proven by the fact that even though the questions you mentioned are indeed interesting, many schools never come close to touching them.
Dude, I was referring to a generic teacher, not me in general.
No, it is not a valid response to a serious question. As for non-serious questions, you obviously never taught. Everyone -- most importantly the other students -- know when a question is serious. And if it indeed serious but no one else is interested, then the obvious response is to tell the student that you will provide him with relevant resources outside class, and to then follow through. Just as one does when an advanced student asks a question that is beyond the ken or outside the interests of average students. There are certainly some difficult challenges when teaching, but dealing with this particular eventuality is not one of them.
I have addressed that. As I have noted, that doesn't work in economics nor in any of the social sciences. Many major topics do not have one correct answer.
That is irrelevant, since the question is not whose single viewpoint should be reflected, but whether the library should purge all but a single viewpoint.
And yet, despite that effectively being the law of the land for decades, school libraries are not full of porn. That is because:the issue is censorship of viewpoints, and porn is not a viewpoint. That is why one can make the sale of Hustler to minors illegal, but not the sale of Mein Kampf. Schools remove material with sexual content from libraries all the time. Prominent examples include The Bluest Eye, The Kite Runner, and Beloved.
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