Leonard Pitts, Jr. wrote the following article in the Miami Herald:
Once again, carnage goes to school. Once again, American students are used for target practice. But conservative leaders are on the case. Recognizing the ongoing threat to our children, they know it’s time for decisive action.
It’s time to do something about books.
And if you expected that sentence to end differently, you haven’t been paying attention. In red America these days, books are Public Enemy No. 1.
As Time magazine recently reported, librarians are seeing a definite spike in censorship activity. Deborah Caldwell-Stone, executive director of the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, called it “an unprecedented volume of challenges.” From Texas to South Carolina, to Virginia to Florida and beyond, conservative governors and advocacy groups are removing books from school library shelves, particularly those that deal with the two subjects they find most threatening: sexuality and race.
All to protect our children.
Open the link and read the article in full.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
THIS Is How The Book Attack Begins. Even Digital Platform Has Been Turned Off!
Llano County Library TEXAS is temporarily closing to review content of children’s books.
The library system will be closed for four days this week, and the library’s online system has been suspended until further notice.
A group of six librarians will be conducting a “thorough review” of every children’s book in the library, at the behest of the Llano County Commissioners Court. The group will be checking to make sure all of the reading material for younger readers includes subjects that are age-appropriate. Additionally, a new “young adults plus” section will be added to separate books written for an older teen audience from those written for younger readers.
Llano County Public Library Director Amber Millum told KVUE that during this week’s temporary closure of all three of their libraries, they will be labeling each book by genre, such as “romance” or “mystery.” She also said they will be putting bright colored stickers on DVDs so that parents can easily tell which ones are appropriate for kids and which ones are not. She said blue and purple stickers will mean the DVDs are good for kids, while red stickers mean the DVD is rated R. She also said that, as of right now, they do not have any books on their shelves that are deemed inappropriate.
Not only are the library buildings temporarily closed, their use of the online system called “Overdrive” has also been stopped. This is the only resource for people to access books and DVDs online through the Llano County Library. There is no set date for the library’s online system to be reactivated, as library leaders say they are looking into other options.
More changes are expected to come for the Llano County Library. Commissioner Sandoval told KVUE they are creating an advisory board that will look over the county library and the online library system, in order to figure out best steps moving forward. The advisory board will consist of 13 people appointed by county commissioners and Llano County Judge Ron Cunningham.
The English words “The pen is mightier than the sword” were first written by novelist and playwright Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839, in his historical play Cardinal Richelieu. Richelieu, chief minister to King Louis XIII, discovers a plot to kill him, but as a priest, he is unable to take up arms against his enemies.
Anyone that fears books so much that they want to censor them is afraid of what that pen might reveal about them.
Between January 2016 and January 2020, who wanted to censor the media, government reports, and books? The answer to that question is Traitor Trump and his fascist MAGA loyalists.
Leonard Pitts, Jr. = 👍🏽
https://claytoonz.com/tag/critical-race-theory/
Dear teachers: Please started posting on your white board:
Danger, students! Do not under any circumstances read the following books, which are much too controversial and inappropriate:
[list of books]
I think that often enough: as any book which a teacher finds important is banned, she could surely draw attention to it in a roundabout way…
Or even with a simple factual statement: The following books have been challenged and removed from the school/public library. And follow that up with a nice media literacy assignment in which students would research WHO was challenging and banning said books, and for what reasons? The students would have to identify the organizations and publications that were advocating for and against banning. The assignment would incorporate current events, media literacy/internet research, using and citing sources, and writing.
I love how you think, Ciedie!!!
Books = Weapons of Mass Instruction
Yes!
Off topic, but it relates to the most important issue in education today, so I’ll leave it here.
When the now fascist Repugnican Party grabs all the reins of power in 2022 and 2024, these semiliterate goosesteppers will have a way of dealing with people who dare to teach from books not part of the new 1776 Curriculum of the Fatherland: “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.”
I purposefully left this untranslated so that people will look it up. There’s an interesting story there.
https://www.ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/1933-1938/book-burning
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-books-insight/in-echo-of-mao-era-chinas-schools-in-book-cleansing-drive-idUSKBN24A1R5
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/book-burning
It would be a simple matter to string together a bunch of statements by Josef Goebbels, Chairman Mao, and current Chinese party functionaries about removing books that defame the country and its heroes or promote divisive ideas and get it signed off by most of our current Repugnican Party leaders from the Congress down to the municipal level.
Four years of the Trump Limbo Party. How low, how low, how low can you go.
Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Well, not since Nazi Germany and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
cx: Joseph Goebbels
Never worry about spelling in this case.
Thanks, Greg. I just read that the ph spelling is dropping out of German. Do Germans sometimes spelling this guy’s name with an f? Or is it still Josef Mengele and Joseph Goebbels?
I envy you, Greg, your fluency in this beautiful language, with its incredibly rich literature.
I should get off my tush and start learning it!!!
It’s too late. If it were not my first language I would never have learned it. Deutsche Sprache, schwere Sprache!
Thanks for the encouragement, Greg!!! LMAO!!!
Seriously, Schottenfreude by Ben Schott might be a good compromise.
Haaa! THIS! Thank you.
Not related to this at all, but I have long been fascinated by words in language that are precise in a way that is untranslatable. Two songs that fit into this are Sigur Ros’s Hoppipola/Med Blodnasir. Their song are in a gibberish called Hopelandic. The vocals are an additional instrument, not literal. But in this case Hoppipola represents the childhood joy of hopping in puddles. The second part of the song, Med Blodnasir, is about getting a bloody nose because of the excitement of jumping in puddles. I love these songs because, even without understanding anything the singer sings, when you know the background, it’s undeniable.
wonderful!
You raise a fascinating issue. Because of the connotations/reverberations of individual words and phrases, exact translation or even paraphrase in the same language, is impossible. And that idea, which was key to the thought of the New Critics, is the basis of Stanley Burnshaw’s books entitled The Poem Itself, which contains translations of poems into English from several languages, along with notes by native speakers about why and in what ways the translations suck. Really interesting books.
Sacha Baron Cohen, are you reading this?
And, National Democratic Party, get some courage. The people have forgotten that we fought a war against this kind of thing in the middle of the last century. It’s time they were remined. The Repugnicans are going to use The Great CRT Scare, married with calls to ban books, under the banner of Parents’ rights, as their Willie Horton, Monkey Business, Benghazi, Swiftboat, and Caravans of Rapists and Murderers as THE PRIMARY AGITPROP for the upcoming election season.
So, it’s time to pair off statements by Governor Abbot, Governor DeSantis, Donald Trump, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, and their ilk with INDISTINGUISHABLE statements by Chairman Mao, Jiang Qing, Joseph Goebbels, Adolph Hitler, Xi Jinping, etc. that remind people of stuff like the Nazi book burnings and the Cultural Revolution.
The country has forgotten.
It’s time for it to be reminded.
It would be interesting to know what subjects are off the table. I can guess a few. Any book written by a homosexual. Any book written with homosexual characters. Any book inconsistent with the Gone with the Wind school of history. Any book mentioning slavery, the genocide of the indigenous population, white supremacy, lynching, … I suspect the list could grow quickly. Books that use accurate vocabulary to describe various body parts would get the ax. And don’t forget degenerate artists.
“any book written by a homosexual”
Hmmm. Socrates, Plato, Catullus, Petronius, Horace, Virgil, Plutarch, Sir Francis Bacon, Shakespeare, John Donne, Lord Byron, Walter Pater, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, Jeremy Bentham, Marcel Proust, D. H. Lawrence, A. E. Houseman, Nikolai Gogol, Honore de Balzac, E. M. Forster, Willa Cather, Sarah Orne Jewett, Arthur Rimbaud, Algernon Swinburne, Paul Verlaine, Frederico Garcia Lorca, Anais Nin, Thomas Mann, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Noel Coward, W. H. Auden, Thornton Wilder, Willfred Owen, Lytton Strachey, Colette, Simon de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes, James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Geroge Santayana, John Cheever, Somerset Maugham, Carson McCullers, Lorraine Hansberry, Jack Kerouac, Joe Orton, Gertrude Stein, Edward Albee, Alice Walker, Jeanette Winterson, Samuel Delany, Thom Gunn, Susan Sontag, Tony Kushner, Adrienne Rich, Maurice Sendak, just to get started on a list. My, Gov. Abbott et al. are going to be very, very busy.
But just imagine how slim and easy to digest the literature books will be with nothing but the poems of real manly men like Josh Hawley and Donald Trump, Jr., left in them!
cx: Simone de Beauvoir. the divine Simone de Beauvoir, who is in heaven now
Bob, sorry this excellent comment was stuck in moderation. WordPress madness.
Your reply gives me the opportunity to wish you and yours a happy holiday season, Diane. Blessings to you all!
Thank you, Bob, and warm wishes to you and your family
Looking forward to the 1776 curriculum. “Socialists in the Hands of an Angry Donald,” by Majorie Greene, “The Craven,” by Ted Cruz, “Stopping by the Gun Shop on a PO’d Evening,” by Mo Brooks and Lauren Boebert. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Fomenting an Insurrection,” by Steve Bannon, “Song of Myself,” by Donald Trump
And, of course, the Sappho and the Allen Ginsberg, but those are already almost always left out of the standard lit texts:
https://bobshepherdonline.wordpress.com/poetry/sappho-speaks-across-the-ages-to-her-lost-love-b-o-b-shepherd/
I’m guessing all works by ammosexuals are fine by them.
Darn it! My reply, Roy, is in moderation.
Those darn degenerate artists! Must. Be. Eradicated!
No more Abe Lincoln in textbooks! After all, he was the first person in America to write a poem describing a marriage between two men. Abe was almost certainly bisexual.
Constitution of The Fourth Reich
The First Amendment Amended
Congress shall make no law disrespecting the establishment of the Christian religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of people to speak the Truth of the Party, or of the official press of said Party; or the right of authorized, armed Citizen Militias to assemble and maintain order and to petition the Government for glorious monuments, military parades, and fireworks shows.
It’s time, as well, that we ban degenerate medicine bottle labels that use words like anal and bladder. Suggestion: stuff down there.
Take twice daily before meals for stuff down there.
And, of course, while we are purifying schools of anatomical labels and of deviant literature, we must get rid of the Bible and of John Milton. The former contains sex between sons of God and Earth women, between Lot and his daughters, at least one instance of fellatio, and much else along those lines. And then there is the work of the great Puritan poet John Milton, who assures us that one of the reasons that we should work to attain heaven is that there sex lasts for days and days and involves complete mingling of perfect bodies across gender lines. Sex among angels, Milton’s Rafael assures us, is a whole lot better than the plain old plain old you are used to.
Milton’s elegy to his dead friend Charles Diodati can only be described as a love poem. There has been much scholarly debate about whether their relationship–Milton’s most intimate–was sexually intimate or simply Platonic. If the latter, it seems pretty clear that the lack of physical intimacy was due to repression of what were, obviously, Milton’s strongest feelings about any other person.
cx: elegies. There were several. And sonnets. “I once made pointless trophies to my vileness,” an older Milton wrote. LOL.
Close relationship, whether physical or not, seem to come with literary figures. I am reminded of Tennyson and Arthur Hallam.
And that magnificent poem, “In Memoriam A.H.H.” Wow.
Was in Austin yesterday and found two books recently released by the UT Press that might well be part of a good reading list for teachers. The first, Teaching Black History to White People, is by a long-time LSU professor that looks incredibly interesting. The second is a book on the Drive-By Truckers. Read the first couple of pages of the intro up to the first break in the link below. I’ve posted the song What It Means here before.
As I thought about how I would likely have reacted to this song if I were still teaching today. At the independent schools I taught in, I could easily have built a one week to one quarter plan in my government class using the lyrics alone to create reading selections and discussion classes. And that’s what I find so tragic about the many comments I have seen from real teachers here, who are surely all creative, competent, and idealistic. Unless you taught at an independent school, a teacher would not have the freedom to teach as they saw fit with the guidance of an involved principal and master faculty colleagues. I guess that’s part of What It Means as well.
Whoops, forgot link: https://smile.amazon.com/Where-Devil-Dont-Stay-Drive/dp/1477318046/ref=sr_1_1?crid=32IT67P5W1OTX&keywords=drive-by+truckers&qid=1640272358&s=books&sprefix=drive-b%2Cstripbooks%2C157&sr=1-1&asin=B08ZHCPDVC&revisionId=a0afdf9b&format=1&depth=1
It certainly is.
And, great song.
And tragic that kids didn’t get that unit from you, Greg, though I’m sure they got much of inestimable value.
Around 375 CE, the Church was busy, busy, busy rounding up heretics and the heretical books and manuscripts they owned, and someone, perhaps a monk connected with a Gnostic sect, buried an urn containing 52 books–bound codices, as opposed to scrolls, perhaps in hopes of returning to retrieve them in a saner time. The urn, with its priceless contents, buried near the village of Nag Hammadi, was uncovered by a farmer in 1945–around 1,500 years later. We have well over 200 Christian gospels, acts, and the like that survive in whole or in fragments that are not part of the canon of the major Christian churches today, found in the various official Bibles.
Will there always be these periods of book-burning madness? And much praise to that anonymous monk who preserved these priceless works.
Getting rid of books is just what they do when they’re getting rid of career teachers and public schools. They will get rid of pencils eventually. And grass and trees and gardens. It’s what they do when they don’t understand what books and teachers are for.