Friday, March 14, 2014
The kind of thing that got Moses so mad he smashed the tablets the first time he came down the mountain with them
Mark Hemingway at The Federalist on the "young adult fiction" genre and authors who pride themselves on getting banned by the few remaining schools that recognize their literary sewage for what it is.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Still, it's a slippery slope banning books, where does it end once it starts? And who is the moral arbiter to be tasked with casting the first stone? Parents can try to ban books from their own children but not from someone elses. That said, I'm sure he's right that a lot of the pap out there written and read by adolescents these days has little or no redeeming value.
ReplyDeleteToo bad, so sad, but nope, gotta let em go, if hey want to read it, they will read it.
How about if these scumbags don't write them in the first place?
ReplyDeleteIf it sells, what are you complaining about as a free marketer? Who is reading these days anyhow? School library budgets have been slashed. In some districts they are sitting on millions of dollars worth of materials but they had to close the library.
ReplyDeleteLibraries that only contain books and chess tables are obsolete.
ReplyDeleteA 21st century library should be at the heart of the school and a place where both students and staff can come in to relax, read, get advice, access powerful devices, edit videos, music, print in 3D and learn how to code to name a few. This 21st century learning space should give people an equal chance to use these devices and access information. Otherwise these libraries will turn into museums where people go to look at all the things we used to use.
From http://ingvihrannar.com/14-things-that-are-obsolete-in-21st-century-schools/
When Central High School opened its new library in 2005 - a $4.5 million research and media hub funded by alumni - Apple named it a national model.
ReplyDeleteStudents visited it more than 147,000 times last year, more than 800 visits a day.
Masterman School's library, also bolstered by fund-raising, bustled with students, too, from early morning till late afternoon.
But now both libraries - the academic hearts of two of Philadelphia's most prestigious schools - have been shuttered.
They are the latest victims of the schools' financial crisis. The district did not fund librarians - so principals at Central, Masterman, and any number of other schools had to cut those positions, along with counselors, assistant principals, and teachers.
Read more at http://articles.philly.com/2013-09-14/news/42064126_1_new-library-central-high-school-marjorie-neff
To answer your question of the second-to-last post, because,along with economic freedom, cultivation of moral virtue is a key component of conservatism. It's what distinguishes us from libertarians. Re: library closings: fill me in on how this is more than tangentially related to the topic of the post.
ReplyDeleteTHe changing role of libraries is interesting, I guess, but the rot of post-American culture requires our urgent consideration.
ReplyDeleteYou just want to censor. Your ilk can censorious. Well, school libraries are sitting ducks for censorship of the nature of what your Hemingway writes about. You wouldn't want the thought police invading private households and confiscating books and other materials they deemed unworthy, for lack of a better term would you? I would guess that, since you have declared your post-American public schools dead and irrelevant that you really would pull the plug on school library funding, especially since some of the materials within you might find lacking in some particular value you hold dear or containing some you detest. This is where freedom hits the road, bippy, not with Amoco or Ford.
ReplyDeleteHell, yes, I'd pull the plug on public-school libraries. In a world without government schools, they'd have no reason to exist.
ReplyDeleteWhy you want to see America's children have their moral compasses utterly destroyed by monsters with an indoctrination agenda is beyond me.
ReplyDeleteParents are charged with setting boundaries. If there are no parents, be my guest, go in loco, you're already half loco now. How shortly after a leader of your ilk isvvelected will pubic school legislation be repealed?
ReplyDeleteGuess you want to ban booksellers from selling these books or even writers from writing them, perhaps readers from reading them. That means pretty much Amazon. Would that be new, used, print, digital or audio? Who needs libraries these days anyhow? Do please note though that the Philadelphia area school libraries that are closed because they can't afford to staff them were funded by private donations.
ReplyDeleteI guess another way of putting my point is that it doesn't even seem to mildly bother you that our culture has become a sewer, and that highly determined ideologues with an open disdain for God-designed human nature make it more of a sewer every day. Consider that there's not a school in America that would have tolerated these books 50 years ago. These people pride themselves on getting banned, because their whole agenda is to "push against the system." They're countercultural. It's part of the broader effort to discredit and kill Western civilization.
ReplyDeleteGood point, we had to find our porno elsewhere and find it we did, didn't we?
ReplyDelete