"Banned in the United States" does not mean the same thing as "Removed from Middle School Libraries"
Removed from one percent of middle school libraries (138 out of ~13000 school districts).
1,626 Books Were Banned Across America Last Year We Reviewed All of Them
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Re: 1,626 Books Were Banned Across America Last Year We Reviewed All of Them
#22>We Reviewed All of Them Am I blind? Where are the reviews? The website is also utterly broken on my device... What I always find interesting is what exactly "banned" means. Certainly there is no government which punishes distribution, printing or reading of those books.
> Certainly there is no government which punishes distribution, printing or reading of those books.
Yes, state and municipal level governments have banned books in the US?
Here's a list of some example laws in, e.g., education: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Tj5WQVBmB6SQg-zP_M8u...
Re: 1,626 Books Were Banned Across America Last Year We Reviewed All of Them
#23Book banning seems like a strange red line to have forgotten. If your kid is going to be corrupted by going into a library and finding a book that's naughtier than your taste, they're probably ahead of their similarly-corruptible peers who aren't in a library at all.
Their findings are that the book bannings are really for the purpose of
Virtue signal by people in positions of institutional power to voting-age parents interested in school choice, parental rights, and wedge social issues to the detriment of non-voting age students Reject and exclude topics that challenge a perceived status quo from the public discourse (e.g. non-heteronormativity, non-cis identity, non-traditional gender roles, and non-Judeo-Christian books are targeted
and that
Fortunately, book bans are widely unpopular amongst parents across the ideological spectrum.
It would make sense though given that reading can be transformative for some people but realistically I think most folks are worried about everyday problems like teen pregnancy and substance abuse or getting into fights - and to your point if they are off reading unbearable moral philosophy in some library they aren't out screwing around.
Re: 1,626 Books Were Banned Across America Last Year We Reviewed All of Them
#24"Banned in the United States" does not mean the same thing as "Removed from Middle School Libraries"
Hm, seems pretty similar to me. Especially when the article itself identifies only 1.6% of the books as having a 17+ rating. [edit] Anyone who believes in freedom of expression and the first amendment should recognize this as a negative step, and a clear thin-edge issue. These are ideological decisions made by partisans with the goal being to shape the corpus of thinking of youth. "Will someone think of the children"…
Hmmm...so it only counted 1.6% of the books as explicit because they had "publisher-provided" maturity ratings of 17+.
I wonder how many books that had explicit material within them were not properly labeled as such by their publishers? This seems like a very subjective standard that would be very easy to manipulate.
Re: 1,626 Books Were Banned Across America Last Year We Reviewed All of Them
#25"Banned in the United States" does not mean the same thing as "Removed from Middle School Libraries"
Perhaps not, but for people in most other countries, the idea that some public schools will just ban whatever they want in an ad hoc fashion amounts to the same thing as saying that it’s the government doing it.
From an international-vs-US perspective, education being state-run or locally-governed is really more of a technicality than anything, because education policy is largely a national concern.
In many (or most?) other developed countries, there is a public-private divide where there is a pretty well established expectation that the government doesn’t ban things it deems “merely immoral”, an expectation exemplified by the separation of church and state. Private institutions on the other hand are given more leeway on that front, because their services are opt-in.
Re: 1,626 Books Were Banned Across America Last Year We Reviewed All of Them
#26"Banned in the United States" does not mean the same thing as "Removed from Middle School Libraries"
"Books banned in the US" has two correct readings (regarding banned books by governments):
1) "Books that were banned, somewhere within the US"
2) "Books that were banned, across the US"
In this case, at the behest of state and municipal governments, there are books that fit into reading one.
Re: 1,626 Books Were Banned Across America Last Year We Reviewed All of Them
#27~975 are "Banned Pending Investigation" which is hyperbole for "Under Review".
Re: 1,626 Books Were Banned Across America Last Year We Reviewed All of Them
#28> Irregular bans are ideologically driven.
> They are supplemental to and fall outside of the standard book exclusion process at schools and libraries. Standard exclusions prevent books that promote violent, hateful, or mature/17+” topics from being placed on school bookshelves while irregular bans do not have robust processes and can be influenced by interest groups or local officials.
Seems like when the book is removed from library using an opaque, bureaucratic process, it’s called “standard exclusion”, and when it is removed using different, more public and democratic process, it’s called “banning”. Otherwise, there is no difference in the actual outcome: whether it is “standard exclusion” or “banning”, the end result is simply that book is removed from library (or prevented from being added) all the same.
Therefore, I agree that the “bans” are “ideologically driven”, because the reason this democratic process of excluding books from libraries is called “banning” is indeed very much ideological.
This might also be useful to non-Americans, who aren’t necessarily intimately familiar with US politics and language games: no book have actually been banned in US in the standard meaning of this word. Every single book on the banned list is completely legal and typically easy to obtain and possess. Even in the schools where these “banned” books were removed from libraries, I believe that the students are entirely free to possess and read these “banned” books: I never heard of schools actually treating these books as contraband. This whole “banning” narrative is simply describing removal of books from libraries through democratic instead of bureaucratic process, and the choice of the word is meant to invoke mental connotations of some sort of authoritarian/totalitarian state.
Re: 1,626 Books Were Banned Across America Last Year We Reviewed All of Them
#29Sadly, the word "ban" has been used all too inapropriatley lately. And this website doesn't seem to help as nowhere did I see exactly what they meant by banned, who banned them, or exactly what the ban entails.
Banning, in this case, means removal from libraries. Sometimes it is by state order, sometimes it is via independent action taken by the school district (although that is usually also in an attempt to adhere with state board of education guidelines).
The linked data source cited for this article provides ban classifications for each and every book they list as banned.
Re: 1,626 Books Were Banned Across America Last Year We Reviewed All of Them
#30> Irregular bans are ideologically driven.
> Standard exclusions prevent books that promote violent, hateful, or mature/17+” topics from being placed on school bookshelves while irregular bans do not have robust processes and can be influenced by interest groups or local officials.
Overgeneralized.
For example, Lord of the Flies is on the list. The standard "violence" filters weren't enough to filter that one out, apparently.
One of the books is literally titled "Sex & Violence." Again, "standard exclusions" didn't filter that out.