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Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

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Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#371
post #3

Hey America, is everything okay down there? Y'all have some truly dystopian stuff going on there. Felony prosecution for showing kids books that the Governor didn't approve of? Yikes.

Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic and ideological flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#372

This is a remarkably crude and revanchist move from Republican politicians. It’s embarrassing but mostly bluster and spectacle. It won’t work, and there are already for more effective and sophisticated forms of media control wielded by their allies (See Jane Meyer’s Dark Money , or Messengers of the Right ). But at the end of the day it’s school-wars red meat for the rubes, and that’s good enough for De Santis.

> It’s embarrassing but mostly bluster and spectacle. It won’t work What they are doing is plain FUD - fear, uncertainty and doubt. And hell yes it works . Vague laws absolutely work, just look at recent cases where women had to wait days for a life-saving abortion because of insanely vague laws, e.g. [1]. [1] https://abcnews.go.com/Health/idaho-woman-shares-19-day-misc...

Agree that it spreads FUD, but I mean it won't work as children can still trivially access banned books if they desire. The much greater threat to children's reading comes not from the particular books available in their school classroom, but from other factors: parental literacy and reading habits; literacy of child; number of books in household, literate culture of child's milieu.

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#373
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Dont forget about us crazy libertarians that want Backpack funding of Schools via School Choice. we clearly want to a "Destroy public education" by making teachers accountable to parents which is a terrible thing according to the teachers union //sidenote we also want to abolish all public unions (including teachers union) as public sector employees use their union to corrupt the election process in their favor screw…

> //sidenote we also want to abolish all public unions (including teachers union) as public sector employees use their union to corrupt the election process in their favor screwing over the tax payer who ends up having no one in their favor in contract talks.

This sounds like trading away some freedom of association for a small group of people — ostensibly for the greater good — which isn’t very pro-liberty in my eyes. Where I live, while the taxpayers do not attend these contract talks we have the final word in that we ultimately decide to pass the school budget or not through voting.

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#374

This would have caused an uproar when I was at school. We organized student strikes for less in junior high school (southern England 1960s).

You organized student strikes in the 60's because they wouldn't let you read gay-sex children's books in school?

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#375
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the book. It was one I was not familiar with. The discussion noted that the book discussed using "toys". They also noted that there was an add for buying sex toys as part of the book. These are elements that really caught my attention. I have a hard time seeing most parents in the US being ok with this material being put in front of kids who are 5-10 years old.

So what you're saying is, rather than have actual data or even a single concrete anecdote, you're happy just passing along word-of-mouth gossip when we already know that the people pushing for these laws are happy outright lying about their intent.

The thing about anecdotes about schools is that you actually can find examples of a lot of bad behavior—because there are lots and lots of schools and lots and lots of teachers and sometimes those teachers are malicious or are catastrophically stupid, just like any other group of people that large.

But when you dig a little farther most of that stuff's usually handled just fine at the school or district level. There's very little justification for involving state or even county level government in addressing things like inappropriate lessons or content, because they do happen but are not an actual systemic problem because they're already dealt with by the existing, very-local systems.

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

with all of the other inane laws that have come before this, this is still mind-blowing? with all of the rhetoric from the governor on all of the other topics, this is still mind-blowing? yes, it's absolutely an abhorrent thing to do and is just dumb at all levels, but is it mind-blowing or "of course they did this" kind of stupid?

Why are you expecting everyone to follow Florida politics and news as closely as you and have the same calibration of what is expected to happen there or not?

How could you not? It's not like I'm actively pursuing "WTF did Florida Man do today", but it's all up in my feeds. I'm usually too busy swatting away "WTF did Texas do that will infringe upon my human rights today" to be actively looking for others, but Texas and Florida seems to be in a grudge match on who can implement religious extremism into law the fastest.

After the first 2 or 3 stories, you see there's a pattern. If this is honestly the first time you've ever heard of some zanny thing that the governor of Florida has done, then I'd have to ask what rock you've been under and is there enough room for me to join you there as it seems to be the only place to avoid Florida news.

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

equally dystopian agenda? One side is removing all books that aren't on a whitelist.

Am I mistaken in understanding that this “White list” is actually a large collection of white lists, and each district’s librarians curate their district’s list?

Wouldn't that be even worse? A teacher could get a felony for having a book that their neighboring school can read. Hyper local laws being felonies sounds incredibly dangerous. How often are the lists updated and how likely is it for the teacher to be operating on the correct list?

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The money's a very small part of the problem. Failing schools have huge piles of money thrown at them all the time, and it doesn't help like one might think it would if that were the main problem. Actually fixing US schools amounts to "fix (or significantly mitigate) the US poverty-cycle problem", unfortunately. Unfortunate because if just funding poor schools like rich schools (Nb sometimes those funding levels are…

> The money's a very small part of the problem. Failing schools have huge piles of money thrown at them all the time, and it doesn't help like one might think it would if that were the main problem. I disagree. When poorer areas have worse student:teacher ratios while paying teachers less, and giving them the most challenging students, it is absolutely about the money. Even if teachers are willing to take on a bigger…

Our very worst local district pays far more than the rich suburban districts and has for many, many years. The schools remain hair-raisingly dangerous and totally ineffective at their jobs. They are also terribly dysfunctional at this point, but that's an outcome of being given an impossible task—fix that completely and they'll just become dysfunctional again after a while.

We can and should fix the money issue, but it's barely gonna move the needle on outcomes. I wish it would because, again, that's a pretty simple fix in the scheme of things, but it won't. The causes are much deeper and would be much harder to address.

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dont forget about us crazy libertarians that want Backpack funding of Schools via School Choice. we clearly want to a "Destroy public education" by making teachers accountable to parents which is a terrible thing according to the teachers union //sidenote we also want to abolish all public unions (including teachers union) as public sector employees use their union to corrupt the election process in their favor screw…

> //sidenote we also want to abolish all public unions (including teachers union) as public sector employees use their union to corrupt the election process in their favor screwing over the tax payer who ends up having no one in their favor in contract talks. This sounds like trading away some freedom of association for a small group of people — ostensibly for the greater good — which isn’t very pro-liberty in my eye…

anti-union is anti-libertarian imo. But I can't gatekeep libertarianism, it's just my personal opinion.

Pure unbridled free market will crush unions anyway, both the kinds formed by corporations (collusion) and those formed by employees (union). There is no need to legislate such action as market forces influence actors towards the more economical choice.

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#380
post #115

Context as to what's happening in US schools... This highlights part of the growing movement and disagreement around culture shaping through kids. To highlight this, if you take a look at school of educations mission statement[1] > Through commitment to innovation, social justice, excellence in teaching and research, and partnerships, the School of Teacher Education will position itself as a national leader in shapin…

“Back in my day…” there was a crusade against Christian prayer and what not. Keep things neutral - to the point that teachers who were otherwise obviously religious would completely dodge the topic when my intellectually curious atheist self asked on topics. Now we’re back at teachers here-and-they’re wanting to assert their belief system in the classroom and activist parents seeking to eliminate this issue… only the…

> there was a crusade against Christian prayer

Bullshit. There was a backlash against forced Christian prayer, as there should be.

> teachers here-and-they’re wanting to assert their belief system in the classroom

Bullshit. Making a wide variety of books available to interested students is literally the opposite of asserting a specific belief system.

> activist parents

Bullshit. This is very clearly neo-fascist alt-right book-burners trying to bring about white Christian nationalism. Very clearly: they're not even trying to hide this fact. Any argument that does not acknowledge this is a bald-faced attempt to instate white Christian nationalism is not in good faith.

> the question becomes should we keep schools neutral or not?

Bullshit. This is a clear attempt to set the standard for "neutral" as "white Christian nationalist" and anything other than that as non-neutral.

> my intellectually curious atheist self

Green username, bad-faith argument filled with bullshit. Why do I get this feeling this statement is similar to "as a gay black man ..."

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