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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.
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.
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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?
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