Good article re: red state library book censorship for 10 year olds?
April 5, 2023 5:56 PM Subscribe
I’m teaching a library lesson to 4th and 5th graders tomorrow and want to start by sharing one or two short news articles about the accelerating efforts to remove ‘controversial’ books from school libraries. Ideally I would like to provoke strong reactions from the kids (this is in liberal Seattle so I’m not worried about pushback.) I’ll be throwing anything I find up on a screen so something with images would be a plus. Have access to NYT and Apple News…
There are a lot of links in that list and considering the age of your audience I would go with a wire story or something locally relevant first, then maybe Book Riot or that Tor.com link. Mary Sue writers tend young and trendy (younger and trendier than the New Republic) but are more opinion than reportage.
posted by fiercekitten at 10:06 PM on April 5, 2023
posted by fiercekitten at 10:06 PM on April 5, 2023
I have no articles, but I have a fact I still find amazing. Long before this modern resurgence of idiocy got going I found a list of books which had been banned in the US. The one that baffled me was Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler, a book about fishing. It was published in 1653 and he was a royalist, so I can't imagine he was too radical.
I assume you're aware that - and I'm sure this will impress children - the next step after banning books is burning them. Books are very solid, and each page chars and flakes off before the next ignites, so they're very hard to burn. NASA did tests to see if they could be safely taken up to Skylab, their first space station. It turned out that they could.
But this means that when stupid people gather to burn books, after half an hour of trying to get their bonfire started, someone has to be dispatched in a hurry to get some jerry cans of gas.
I suppose it's possible that someone with literary aspirations and fascist leanings has written a guide to holding a successful book-burning. I'm sure someone else has tried to ban it.
posted by AugustusCrunch at 10:14 PM on April 5, 2023
I assume you're aware that - and I'm sure this will impress children - the next step after banning books is burning them. Books are very solid, and each page chars and flakes off before the next ignites, so they're very hard to burn. NASA did tests to see if they could be safely taken up to Skylab, their first space station. It turned out that they could.
But this means that when stupid people gather to burn books, after half an hour of trying to get their bonfire started, someone has to be dispatched in a hurry to get some jerry cans of gas.
I suppose it's possible that someone with literary aspirations and fascist leanings has written a guide to holding a successful book-burning. I'm sure someone else has tried to ban it.
posted by AugustusCrunch at 10:14 PM on April 5, 2023
Response by poster: Thanks for the responses. I ended up using a couple YouTube videos- one about Jerry Craft (“New Kid”) having his book removed from schools in Tx and one from an organization that featured parents reading from “I Am Jazz” with shocked reactions. It was very effective.
posted by carterk at 6:48 PM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by carterk at 6:48 PM on April 6, 2023 [1 favorite]
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posted by humbug at 6:22 PM on April 5, 2023