Live data from Hacker News

Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

popular.info

391–400 of 500 posts

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s Florida. And, no, things aren’t okay.

Florida gets a bad rap. Their Sunshine Law[0] has them voluntarily offering their dirty laundry to the public to keep themselves accountable. Only an ignorant or a jealous fool would call that a bad thing. You have to truly be living in 1984 to want your government to hide more things from you. [0] https://floridadep.gov/sites/default/files/FloridaSunshinePu...

1) Small time offenders should probably be given the same dignity and privacy as other people. There's no reason to believe allowing people to turn a police blotter into weekly entertainment is a positive thing.

2) This is about the state government doing things. Florida's different criminal disclosure laws have no relevance here. Florida is fucky because florida's state government is run by a narcissist who wishes he was a dictator.

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a motte-and-bailey fallacy [0], using the (easy to defend) argument "we shouldn't give obscene material to 8-year-olds" to justify the (indefensible) argument that "no material that any parents find ideologically reprehensible should be made available to any children through the school system". Note that nobody in this thread defending the policy has been able to name any of these porn books that have been gi…

(Posted elsewhere in the discussion, but that ended up being on a dead thread) There is a strong movement afoot to define any material teaching about 1) consent (whether it mentions sex or not) 2) the child's own body (in ways designed to help them recognize and avoid things like sexual abuse) 3) queer issues of any kind, but especially trans issues as pornographic, regardless of the actual content, so that they can…

Remember that the conservative take for decades was "if we allow gays to marry, what's next, allowing dogs to get married? Or people to marry kids?"

Conservatives have been pushing to make being gay or trans or queer in any way to be morally equivalent or at least directly leading to pedophilia forever.

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#393
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To fill in some context... This isn't about Governor approval. This was approved by the legislature and signed into law by the governor. Not a mandate by them. The context of all of this is teachers putting books in front of kids that their parents don't approve of. I'm not in Florida but I'll give you a local example to me that's come under debate. A book with sexually explicit material was recently pulled from an e…

> I'm not in Florida but I'll give you a local example to me that's come under debate. A book with sexually explicit material was recently pulled from an elementary school. What book was it? I ask because the first real science fiction book that I ever read, that inspired a life-long love for the genre, and which I read under the age of ten, was Rendezvous With Rama, which did contain a sex scene. And the presence of…

The hilarious part is that young teens will find pretty much anything arousing anyway. When I was that age, one of the books in the Ender's Game series involved a weird scene where someone attempts to essentially seduce Ender. You can bet I re-read that scene a hundred times. Or a scene in a harry potter book where a couple young teens talk about making out.

If you want to prevent any "sexualization" content from reaching your young readers, you pretty much have to limit them to Go Dog Go.

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#394
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not in Florida but I'll give you a local example to me that's come under debate. A book with sexually explicit material was recently pulled from an elementary school. What book was it? I ask because the first real science fiction book that I ever read, that inspired a life-long love for the genre, and which I read under the age of ten, was Rendezvous With Rama, which did contain a sex scene. And the presence of…

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.

Popular science magazine has it's back several pages full of ads for sketchy dick pills, "romantic couple" porn videos, and other sex services. My mother got really upset but I just wanted to read about the B2 bomber so she pretty quickly realized that it was a non-issue.

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#395

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…

No. Lot's of money is sent to the school district where it then gets squandared into sports fields and administrator pay while the district cries to teachers that it doesn't have enough money to pay them more. Anyone thinking teachers are actually getting the money from these "funding increases" apparently doesn't know who is in control of that money. It's not teachers.

> No.

Yes.

The topic was leveling out district funding, not paying teachers more. Leveling out district funding might help a little, but it's not the main cause of bad schools/districts. Paying teachers more might help, but would also not do much for the worst districts. Those bad schools and districts are, to a large degree, merely symptoms of larger societal problems that schools aren't equipped, empowered, or intended to address.

The problems are in how our economy is structured, how our social safety net is scoped, funded, and arranged, how fallout from various racist older systems have affected the current state of the country, the justice system, and probably in certain socialized behaviors or attitudes (which are all tied up in those other things, anyway). You cannot turn a terrible district in a very bad part of the city, or awful, poor rural school districts, into good districts just by giving them more money, no matter what they spend the money on (unless you put the schools in charge of sweeping social reform programs, I guess, but I don't think anyone's proposing that and it's probably not the best way to administer such things).

The kids and the parents have problems the schools can't fix, and those affect school life in ways that put a ceiling on how well the schools can do, no matter how good the schools per se are. The main reason some districts or schools are better than others has more to do with selection bias than funding—schools with easy-to-teach kids do well, schools with hard-to-teach kids don't, and the reasons some kids are in one of those categories and others are in the other mostly aren't within the scope of what schools can fix, period.

Rich districts aren't good mainly because they have more money on account of high house prices, but because high house prices and (sometimes) other circumstances (car dependency, commute range) select for kids with stable, comfortable home lives, parents who value education and are themselves educated, and little criminality or blatantly anti-social behavior in (at least) their immediate family & friend circle—because absence of those qualities in home-life tend to correlate with poverty, so, with not being able to afford to move to districts with expensive housing. The house prices are an important part of the reason, but not (mainly) because they enable higher tax revenues.

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's nothing called "CRT" being taught to grade school kids. Teaching math using statistical examples from the Implicit Association Test is problematic how?

How is it beneficial when any other graph could be used to teach the math?

If you think math problem context drives social change then you are going to have to go find me data on people suddenly buying 37 watermelons at a time after math problems we got in the early 2000s

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool, but do you have any sources that haven't been produced by an organization well-known for repeated lies and fraud?

I am not familiar with them being well known for lies or fraud. Showing actual video seems like a way to avoid that. The videos seem to speak for themselves. Even if taken out of context it looks reaaaally bad.

They are on the record as faking these videos before, as in, scripting and making them up.

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#398
post #240

This is a backlash to these kind of books: https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1615866743444078593 https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1613623613156098049 https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1612817285676244997 https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1609719090456793089/... Please don't attack me for posting something from this Twitter account, I don't endorse them, I'm just providing an example of what t…

So... one book about a boy who wants to imitate mermaids, a couple of books that acknowledge to children in a non-detailed way that transgender people exist at all, and books like Gender Queer [1] and This Book Is Gay [2], which are targeted at the junior high and up age group and have basically the same level of explicit detail as the sex ed courses those kids have already gone through (but are, I guess, somehow ext…

Not so much with the other three links, but if there was content in my school library as porny as the stuff in that first link, I really wish someone had told me about it so I could have checked it out. Sure I had the Internet by high school, but desktops ruled the world back then, so that content wasn't terribly portable.

I am against this sort of censorship, especially when imposed externally on a district, and don't even necessarily mind those exact books being in a high school library, but, like... I also don't remember any graphic novels depicting even straight sex in that kind of way, in our school libraries, just un-sexy sex-ed-book or encyclopedia illustrations and such, and I don't think there were even that many of those—I do get why the presence of that content in schools might surprise or alarm some folks.

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#399
post #40

Teachers are already paid little and dealing with the stress of managing large classrooms with little pay has to be turning off a lot of teachers away from that career path. With laws like this our future pipeline of teachers is essentially getting gutted. I guess republicans are winning on both fronts here. One, they pander hard to the extreme base and two, they kill public education and make private education more…

"I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won't have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over again and Christians will be running them." -- Jerry Falwell

He did not.

Re: Unapproved books now a felony in Manatee County schools

#400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, Florida has banned private schooling and homeschooling? That seems like a much bigger problem.

People shouldn’t need to take their kids out of school to avoid ideological indoctrination.

I mean, schooling children at all is ideological: it's literally built on the ideology that we should have an educated populace. I'm really confused by this statement.
Post reply on HN