Banning Bans—Bananas!
I finally found the silver lining to all the book bans of late: Textbook companies are struggling. I’ve always hated textbooks. They’re boring. Expensive. Heavy to lug around. A poor substitute for real books.
Book-banning school boards have put textbook publishers on notice. If any material in the books supplied by these companies crosses the new ill-defined guidelines for what is educationally appropriate, publishers will be held accountable. According to The Washington Post, “… firms are spending months negotiating with education departments, politicians and school officials to ensure the books they sell won’t leave them imprisoned, slapped with onerous fines or banned from doing business…”
Yay!
The Post tells me that “… in Texas, publishers and sellers must spend the next year screening every book they’ve sold to public school districts in order to recall any “sexually explicit” titles …” Brilliant! Normally publishers publish what they want, and people purchasing books for kids bear the responsibility for scrutinizing the texts. But chances are school board members don’t want to review textbooks. Like me, they probably find these dinosaurs dull. So, they’ve put the onus on the vendors. Hah!
Brilliance is not limited to Texas, of course. Florida’s education department has found racist content in math textbooks, and discovered social studies texts likely to make students suffer “guilt, anguish, or … psychological distress.” They’ve decried these tomes as unacceptable.
In Tennessee, publishers operate under the threat of six years in jail for providing “obscene” materials to schools as per a law that took effect in July. I can’t help but wonder if, prior to July, it was okay to print smut-filled textbooks in the Volunteer State. Maybe if I’d grown up in Nashville or Memphis textbooks would not have been so boring!
I’m sorry this didn’t happen when I was a student. Ah, school daze without textbooks! A distinct improvement.
But wait — Wouldn’t you know some woke liberal state would interfere with this nirvana-seeking process? Illinois is banning book bans! J.B. Pritzker, the governor of the Prairie State, signed a bill into law making his state the first in the nation to outlaw book bans. He said, “Young people shouldn’t be kept from learning about the realities of our world; I want them to become critical thinkers, exposed to ideas that they disagree with, proud of what our nation has overcome, and thoughtful about what comes next…”
Well, Hell’s Belles! I went to school in Chicago and suffered years of textbooks. With no incentive for publishers to go bankrupt, textbooks will likely be a permanent feature in Illinois public schools. This is bananas! Those poor children.
Let’s pause a moment. Let me extract my tongue from my cheek.
Pritzker’s move is a salve for my wounded soul. I have been struggling to understand how the legislators of so-called red states (I can remember when the term “red” signified communist. I guess our red legislators can’t recall this. Maybe their history books have been censored) could be so narrow-minded as to think their view of what makes books appropriate or inappropriate is the ideal view for everybody in a democracy.
On second thought, maybe describing these folks as “red” is fitting after all. Democracy is clearly not their end goal.