6 ms·

If anybody thinks this is a good idea, I'm looking forward to reading your opinions.

by deugtniet 4y ago

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
It's a bit harsh but I mean, all it boils down to is: Teachers shall teach the curriculum.
- wyldfire 4y ago
  That is weird. I guess we can agree to that principle but do we need to be draconian about it? Do we need laws to make teachers focus on curriculum? Didn't you ever read a book that wasn't prescribed by the curriculum?
  - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
    I don't think so but it's Florida. I don't live in Florida. The majority in Florida must somehow be OK with this and it's their teachers and children. Don't take my nuance to mean that I approve of this or think it's a good idea.
    - faster 4y ago
      Why do you think the majority of Floridians are OK with this? Does it matter to American politicians that the majority of Americans are in favor of access to abortions? The noisy people and PACs who donate to campaigns are against it and that's all that matters.
      - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
        > Why do you think the majority of Floridians are OK with this? I don't know. I don't live in Florida. If it's not against the law why should I care? > Does it matter to American politicians that the majority of Americans are in favor of access to abortions? Abortion is legal in my state. ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
    - agloeregrets 4y ago
      Conceptually, if the government defines the teaching, at what point do the people run the government and at what point does the government run the people? Also, politics in America are way more messy than that. The choice becomes "People you agree 50% with or people you agree 20% with?". I would bet that if this were put to a statewide vote, it would not pass.
      - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
        The community/voters define the government and the government defines the teaching. Which entity is more in touch with the wants and needs of Florida voters: Florida's state and local governments or the federal government in Washington?
        agloeregrets 4y ago
        The hiring of teachers is approved by community elected school boards. FL laws take that power from communities and puts it in State level hands. Your point is upside-down and tries to paint heavy handed big-government rules as better in fact. Also who said anything about DC? The point was about letting teachers, parents, and yes, minors; make choices for kids. This is whitewashing extremist beliefs over communities that very well may disagree, exactly what you imply this protects lol.
  - epicureanideal 4y ago
    I wouldn’t have thought laws like this were needed, but then there are things like this: https://youtu.be/TwucVRj_mdc https://youtu.be/TwucVRj_mdc
    - crooked-v 4y ago
      Cool, but do you have any sources that haven't been produced by an organization well-known for repeated lies and fraud?
      - epicureanideal 4y ago
        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.
        mrguyorama 4y ago
        They are on the record as faking these videos before, as in, scripting and making them up.
        epicureanideal 4y ago
        Can you link some sources please, ideally from neutral organizations?
        mrguyorama 4y ago
        First, define, specifically, what you consider a neutral organization.
- lcuff 4y ago
  Which for some, (like me), is ludicrous. My own take is that children learn best (or for some, learn at all) when their interest in something is piqued or they are inspired by a teacher. (I only did homework for teachers I liked throughout my time in elementary and high school.) I claim most of what we learn in school is completely irrelevant to our lives anyway (with a clear exception of learning to read at all). My wife rose to an executive position in a big company without knowing her 'times tables'. "Teaching the curriculum" also leads to the textbooks that came into use after the "No child left behind" legislation. When I read them, I was simultaneously outraged and wanted to cry at (a) how dry they were (b) how memorization-focused they were (c) (for Euclidian Geometry) how much wrong information they contained. With billions of books in the world, having a very short white list of books means the chances of a teacher suggesting a book that would inspire a particular kid plummets. We get a little closer to Farenheit 451 every passing day.
  - linuxftw 4y ago
    > interest in something is piqued or they are inspired by a teacher Don't you see how this is a direct example of teachers having outsized influence on students, and how they shouldn't be allowed to 'teach' them whatever the please? People put education on some kind of pedestal. Like it's a magical place of discovery. No, it's to provide basic literacy and math skills to the poor so they can function in society.
    - loudmax 4y ago
      I can't tell whether you're making that argument in earnest, or you left out the /s sarcasm tag.
      - linuxftw 4y ago
        Completely in earnest.
  - anon291 4y ago
    > My wife rose to an executive position in a big company without knowing her 'times tables'. Well that alone explains a lot of the problems this country is in, and is not the stunning argument for your side you may believe it to be.
brightball 4y ago
I’m not going to suggest it’s a good idea, but I know when math books became a topic it was supposedly because some type of political stuff was being included in the problems. Haven’t followed it closely but I do remember hearing that. I’ll see if I can find a link. EDIT: Found one. https://nypost.com/2022/04/22/floridas-banned-math-textbooks-include-racial-bias-graph/ https://nypost.com/2022/04/22/floridas-banned-math-textbooks...
- matmc 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - brightball 4y ago
    Here’s the same story and same examples from NBC if it helps. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/-racist-florida-releases-examples-prohibited-topics-rejected-math-book-rcna25625 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/-racist-florida-release...
    - cratermoon 4y ago
      There's nothing called "CRT" being taught to grade school kids. Teaching math using statistical examples from the Implicit Association Test is problematic how?
      - brightball 4y ago
        How is it beneficial when any other graph could be used to teach the math?
        mrguyorama 4y ago
        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
        4y ago
realworldperson 4y ago
[dead]
Jiro 4y ago
There's actually a very simple argument: The existing system has been used as a workaround by activists to defacto teach things that shouldn't be taught to students. Keeping the books out of the library is the best practical method of stopping this, because directly controlling the contents of the curriculum is hard to enforce. That argument may or may not be true in this particular case, but it's not some impossible thing that can't ever have a good reason behind it. Edit: Also, don't confuse school libraries with public libraries. Schools make content-based decisions about what's appropriate for students all the time.
- watwut 4y ago
  The felony part suggests it is not school doing decision, but law enforcement.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > The existing system has been used as a workaround by activists to defacto teach things that shouldn't be taught to students. And who determines, with which justification, what should be taught to students? Teaching science and facts should never be something controversial, and I'd expect teachers to be able (and allowed to) make that decision - they know the children under their responsibility the best, not politicians.
  - agloe_dreams 4y ago
    > Teaching science and facts should never be something controversial lol. May I introduce you to the right-wing south. They can't even agree on the age of the earth.
- CydeWeys 4y ago
  > Also, don't confuse school libraries with public libraries. What's the actual meaningful distinction here? Both are publicly funded, that students/kid can choose to go to and browse books in (but rarely do). It's not like kids are banned from public libraries.
  - 4y ago
Ekaros 4y ago
What would be the other end? At both extremes there is content that more centrist sides disapprove. Should either of the ends be allowed? Or should it swap around as either side gains power in politics?
alexb_ 4y ago
Let me be clear that I do not agree at all, in any way with this argument, I'm just answering your question as to what the opinion of people who like this think. There are books which contain explicit depictions of sex between teenagers. Why do you want teenagers thinking that having sex before you are 18 is normal? Kids shouldn't be reading stuff about sex (gay, straight, or otherwise) before they are adults. The only people who would be opposed to that sort of thing are groomers. A lot of people replying to this skipped over part of this comment. I DO NOT AGREE WITH THIS ARGUMENT. I AM JUST PUTTING IT HERE TO ANSWER THE QUESTION!!!!
- l33t233372 4y ago
  There’s nothing magical about the age 18. The age of consent in many states is lower. Hell, the age at which you can join the military is lower. People under 18 have sex all the time, and they should absolutely be reading stuff about sex before then.
  - mcv 4y ago
    Yeah. It's rather important to be able to tell the difference between educational books about sex, normal, healthy sexual relationships, and porn. I can understand banning porn that encourages unrealistic expectations from sex (which is a problem), and the other two. If you ban the other two, you can bet children will learn about sex from porn. Or not at all and be really surprised when they get pregnant.
- loudmax 4y ago
  I'm not completely sure that everyone making this argument actually believes it. Presumably there are some who do, but I suspect there's a large portion of people who are looking for a way to selectively fire teachers they don't like. Certainly there are politicians who benefit from stoking outrage, and supporters who enjoy boasting of their commitment to their cause by taking an extreme position on a culture war issue.
- wolrah 4y ago
  You should really emphasize your first sentence in some way, it was really easy to have eyes drawn to the second part when skimming down the thread.
linuxftw 4y ago
It didn't used to be a law, so clearly something has happened that made this idea popular enough to be passed into law. I guess teachers thought that because they have access to other people's children, they're allowed to put whatever ideas into their heads that they please. Those days are coming to a close.
motohagiography 4y ago
I can make a charitable case for it. It's mandatory state/public education, so the curriculum is legislated and kids are forced to be there, and to start, we have a captive audience. The subject legislation was in response to some arguably extreme cases where there is a concerted effort to distribute lgbtq pornography to kids as a way to use critical theories to shift social norms around sexuality, but uniquely using intersectionality - a recognized political pressure technique to do so. It doesn't work on the majority of adults who see it for what it is, and so its proponents have moved upstream and turned to using the tactic directly on children where they will not encounter resistance to the change they seek to make. There is little argument that the teachers and advocates for these materials in elementary schools have a stated desire to abolish the civilization these children would otherwise grow up to inherit and become stewards of. Call it what you will, all the words are artifacts of the same basic critical theory and premises ('ist, 'phobic, anti-' etc.) that form a whole new language one either speaks and thinks in, or does not. It's designed to alienate and atomize people so as to manage and extract value from the conflicts you as an activist create. Those words are threats it uses to protect the real underlying ideology from rational scrutiny. From an educational perspective, this is not the drawing out and developing of childrens minds, but rather the funneling and shaping them as an openly stated means to create young activists intent on demolishing the pillars of social stability from which all social growth and progress has emerged. Instead of having kids and raising them the way religion-based societies and cultures do, mormons, muslims, hindus, christians, etc. and being the change, these activists are leveraging the mandates of the education system to undermine the society they wish to upend. A key front in this is teaching intersectionality, where your beliefs become immutable identities under the umbrella of a system of infinitely regressing subjectivity and criticism instead of deriving a free and independent identity from experience and competence. I'm not going to relitigate intersectionality on this thread other than to say it was invented and not discovered, and all of its proponents' arguments reduce to "everything is made of words, words have no fixed meaning, so nothing has fixed meaning, therefore - all things meaning nothing - my belief is equivalent to your experience, there is only struggle for power, and if you disagree, you are my antagonist." It's nihilism all the way down. They imagine themselves engaged in a kind of science by picking random disciplines and testing them to dissolve in their solipsisms. To do this, some activists are using pornography as a vehicle to inject this critical narrative into the sexual developent of school children, and adulterate these kids' sense of truth and reality by claiming the new concepts in the minds of children as they begin to apprehend them, with words and narrative that subordinates them to the system of criticism the activists are militating for, and with the neutralizing uncertainties of their theory. Florida's legislature has reacted to it by requiring scrutiny of what goes into those schools. That is a charitable case for Florida's reaction. I can't defend individuals actuated by deeply held hatreds, or who this view might have something in common with, but if we are going to learn about why someone would go so far as to ban this material, it's important to do so with tools that are not merely the artifacts of the hall of mirrors critical theory solipsisms this virus is using to fillibuster, disrupt, harass, and delay rational discussion about it.

If anybody thinks this is a good idea, I'm looking forward to reading your opinions.

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

It's a bit harsh but I mean, all it boils down to is: Teachers shall teach the curriculum.

wyldfire 4y ago
That is weird. I guess we can agree to that principle but do we need to be draconian about it? Do we need laws to make teachers focus on curriculum? Didn't you ever read a book that wasn't prescribed by the curriculum?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  I don't think so but it's Florida. I don't live in Florida. The majority in Florida must somehow be OK with this and it's their teachers and children. Don't take my nuance to mean that I approve of this or think it's a good idea.
  - faster 4y ago
    Why do you think the majority of Floridians are OK with this? Does it matter to American politicians that the majority of Americans are in favor of access to abortions? The noisy people and PACs who donate to campaigns are against it and that's all that matters.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
      > Why do you think the majority of Floridians are OK with this? I don't know. I don't live in Florida. If it's not against the law why should I care? > Does it matter to American politicians that the majority of Americans are in favor of access to abortions? Abortion is legal in my state. ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
  - agloeregrets 4y ago
    Conceptually, if the government defines the teaching, at what point do the people run the government and at what point does the government run the people? Also, politics in America are way more messy than that. The choice becomes "People you agree 50% with or people you agree 20% with?". I would bet that if this were put to a statewide vote, it would not pass.
    - 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
      The community/voters define the government and the government defines the teaching. Which entity is more in touch with the wants and needs of Florida voters: Florida's state and local governments or the federal government in Washington?
      - agloeregrets 4y ago
        The hiring of teachers is approved by community elected school boards. FL laws take that power from communities and puts it in State level hands. Your point is upside-down and tries to paint heavy handed big-government rules as better in fact. Also who said anything about DC? The point was about letting teachers, parents, and yes, minors; make choices for kids. This is whitewashing extremist beliefs over communities that very well may disagree, exactly what you imply this protects lol.
- epicureanideal 4y ago
  I wouldn’t have thought laws like this were needed, but then there are things like this: https://youtu.be/TwucVRj_mdc https://youtu.be/TwucVRj_mdc
  - crooked-v 4y ago
    Cool, but do you have any sources that haven't been produced by an organization well-known for repeated lies and fraud?
    - epicureanideal 4y ago
      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.
      - mrguyorama 4y ago
        They are on the record as faking these videos before, as in, scripting and making them up.
        epicureanideal 4y ago
        Can you link some sources please, ideally from neutral organizations?
        mrguyorama 4y ago
        First, define, specifically, what you consider a neutral organization.
lcuff 4y ago
Which for some, (like me), is ludicrous. My own take is that children learn best (or for some, learn at all) when their interest in something is piqued or they are inspired by a teacher. (I only did homework for teachers I liked throughout my time in elementary and high school.) I claim most of what we learn in school is completely irrelevant to our lives anyway (with a clear exception of learning to read at all). My wife rose to an executive position in a big company without knowing her 'times tables'. "Teaching the curriculum" also leads to the textbooks that came into use after the "No child left behind" legislation. When I read them, I was simultaneously outraged and wanted to cry at (a) how dry they were (b) how memorization-focused they were (c) (for Euclidian Geometry) how much wrong information they contained. With billions of books in the world, having a very short white list of books means the chances of a teacher suggesting a book that would inspire a particular kid plummets. We get a little closer to Farenheit 451 every passing day.
- linuxftw 4y ago
  > interest in something is piqued or they are inspired by a teacher Don't you see how this is a direct example of teachers having outsized influence on students, and how they shouldn't be allowed to 'teach' them whatever the please? People put education on some kind of pedestal. Like it's a magical place of discovery. No, it's to provide basic literacy and math skills to the poor so they can function in society.
  - loudmax 4y ago
    I can't tell whether you're making that argument in earnest, or you left out the /s sarcasm tag.
    - linuxftw 4y ago
      Completely in earnest.
- anon291 4y ago
  > My wife rose to an executive position in a big company without knowing her 'times tables'. Well that alone explains a lot of the problems this country is in, and is not the stunning argument for your side you may believe it to be.

brightball 4y ago

I’m not going to suggest it’s a good idea, but I know when math books became a topic it was supposedly because some type of political stuff was being included in the problems. Haven’t followed it closely but I do remember hearing that. I’ll see if I can find a link. EDIT: Found one. https://nypost.com/2022/04/22/floridas-banned-math-textbooks-include-racial-bias-graph/ https://nypost.com/2022/04/22/floridas-banned-math-textbooks...

matmc 4y ago
[flagged]
- brightball 4y ago
  Here’s the same story and same examples from NBC if it helps. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/-racist-florida-releases-examples-prohibited-topics-rejected-math-book-rcna25625 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/-racist-florida-release...
  - cratermoon 4y ago
    There's nothing called "CRT" being taught to grade school kids. Teaching math using statistical examples from the Implicit Association Test is problematic how?
    - brightball 4y ago
      How is it beneficial when any other graph could be used to teach the math?
      - mrguyorama 4y ago
        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
      - 4y ago

realworldperson 4y ago

[dead]

Jiro 4y ago

There's actually a very simple argument: The existing system has been used as a workaround by activists to defacto teach things that shouldn't be taught to students. Keeping the books out of the library is the best practical method of stopping this, because directly controlling the contents of the curriculum is hard to enforce. That argument may or may not be true in this particular case, but it's not some impossible thing that can't ever have a good reason behind it. Edit: Also, don't confuse school libraries with public libraries. Schools make content-based decisions about what's appropriate for students all the time.

watwut 4y ago
The felony part suggests it is not school doing decision, but law enforcement.
mschuster91 4y ago
> The existing system has been used as a workaround by activists to defacto teach things that shouldn't be taught to students. And who determines, with which justification, what should be taught to students? Teaching science and facts should never be something controversial, and I'd expect teachers to be able (and allowed to) make that decision - they know the children under their responsibility the best, not politicians.
- agloe_dreams 4y ago
  > Teaching science and facts should never be something controversial lol. May I introduce you to the right-wing south. They can't even agree on the age of the earth.
CydeWeys 4y ago
> Also, don't confuse school libraries with public libraries. What's the actual meaningful distinction here? Both are publicly funded, that students/kid can choose to go to and browse books in (but rarely do). It's not like kids are banned from public libraries.
- 4y ago

Ekaros 4y ago

What would be the other end? At both extremes there is content that more centrist sides disapprove. Should either of the ends be allowed? Or should it swap around as either side gains power in politics?

alexb_ 4y ago

Let me be clear that I do not agree at all, in any way with this argument, I'm just answering your question as to what the opinion of people who like this think. There are books which contain explicit depictions of sex between teenagers. Why do you want teenagers thinking that having sex before you are 18 is normal? Kids shouldn't be reading stuff about sex (gay, straight, or otherwise) before they are adults. The only people who would be opposed to that sort of thing are groomers. A lot of people replying to this skipped over part of this comment. I DO NOT AGREE WITH THIS ARGUMENT. I AM JUST PUTTING IT HERE TO ANSWER THE QUESTION!!!!

l33t233372 4y ago
There’s nothing magical about the age 18. The age of consent in many states is lower. Hell, the age at which you can join the military is lower. People under 18 have sex all the time, and they should absolutely be reading stuff about sex before then.
- mcv 4y ago
  Yeah. It's rather important to be able to tell the difference between educational books about sex, normal, healthy sexual relationships, and porn. I can understand banning porn that encourages unrealistic expectations from sex (which is a problem), and the other two. If you ban the other two, you can bet children will learn about sex from porn. Or not at all and be really surprised when they get pregnant.
loudmax 4y ago
I'm not completely sure that everyone making this argument actually believes it. Presumably there are some who do, but I suspect there's a large portion of people who are looking for a way to selectively fire teachers they don't like. Certainly there are politicians who benefit from stoking outrage, and supporters who enjoy boasting of their commitment to their cause by taking an extreme position on a culture war issue.
wolrah 4y ago
You should really emphasize your first sentence in some way, it was really easy to have eyes drawn to the second part when skimming down the thread.

linuxftw 4y ago

It didn't used to be a law, so clearly something has happened that made this idea popular enough to be passed into law. I guess teachers thought that because they have access to other people's children, they're allowed to put whatever ideas into their heads that they please. Those days are coming to a close.

motohagiography 4y ago

I can make a charitable case for it. It's mandatory state/public education, so the curriculum is legislated and kids are forced to be there, and to start, we have a captive audience. The subject legislation was in response to some arguably extreme cases where there is a concerted effort to distribute lgbtq pornography to kids as a way to use critical theories to shift social norms around sexuality, but uniquely using intersectionality - a recognized political pressure technique to do so. It doesn't work on the majority of adults who see it for what it is, and so its proponents have moved upstream and turned to using the tactic directly on children where they will not encounter resistance to the change they seek to make. There is little argument that the teachers and advocates for these materials in elementary schools have a stated desire to abolish the civilization these children would otherwise grow up to inherit and become stewards of. Call it what you will, all the words are artifacts of the same basic critical theory and premises ('ist, 'phobic, anti-' etc.) that form a whole new language one either speaks and thinks in, or does not. It's designed to alienate and atomize people so as to manage and extract value from the conflicts you as an activist create. Those words are threats it uses to protect the real underlying ideology from rational scrutiny. From an educational perspective, this is not the drawing out and developing of childrens minds, but rather the funneling and shaping them as an openly stated means to create young activists intent on demolishing the pillars of social stability from which all social growth and progress has emerged. Instead of having kids and raising them the way religion-based societies and cultures do, mormons, muslims, hindus, christians, etc. and being the change, these activists are leveraging the mandates of the education system to undermine the society they wish to upend. A key front in this is teaching intersectionality, where your beliefs become immutable identities under the umbrella of a system of infinitely regressing subjectivity and criticism instead of deriving a free and independent identity from experience and competence. I'm not going to relitigate intersectionality on this thread other than to say it was invented and not discovered, and all of its proponents' arguments reduce to "everything is made of words, words have no fixed meaning, so nothing has fixed meaning, therefore - all things meaning nothing - my belief is equivalent to your experience, there is only struggle for power, and if you disagree, you are my antagonist." It's nihilism all the way down. They imagine themselves engaged in a kind of science by picking random disciplines and testing them to dissolve in their solipsisms. To do this, some activists are using pornography as a vehicle to inject this critical narrative into the sexual developent of school children, and adulterate these kids' sense of truth and reality by claiming the new concepts in the minds of children as they begin to apprehend them, with words and narrative that subordinates them to the system of criticism the activists are militating for, and with the neutralizing uncertainties of their theory. Florida's legislature has reacted to it by requiring scrutiny of what goes into those schools. That is a charitable case for Florida's reaction. I can't defend individuals actuated by deeply held hatreds, or who this view might have something in common with, but if we are going to learn about why someone would go so far as to ban this material, it's important to do so with tools that are not merely the artifacts of the hall of mirrors critical theory solipsisms this virus is using to fillibuster, disrupt, harass, and delay rational discussion about it.