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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.
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.
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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