cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/13249285
A book about book bans has been banned in a Florida school district.
Ban This Book, a children’s book written by Alan Gratz, will no longer be available in the Indian River county school district since the school board voted to remove the book last month.
Gratz’s book, which came out in 2017, follows fourth-grader Amy Anne Ollinger as she tries to check out her favorite book. Ollinger is told by the librarian she cannot, because it was banned after a classmate’s parent thought it was inappropriate. She then creates a secret banned-books library, entering into “an unexpected battle over book banning, censorship, and who has the right to decide what she and her fellow students can read”, according to the book’s description on Gratz’s website.
In a peculiar case of life imitating art, Jennifer Pippin, a parent in the coastal community, challenged the book.
Pippin’s opposition is what prompted the school board to vote 3-2 in favor of removing it from shelves. The vote happened despite the district’s book-review committee vetting the work and deciding to keep it in schools.
Indian River county school board members disagreed with how Gratz’s book referred to other works that had been taken out of school, and accused it of “teaching rebellion of school-board authority”, according to the Tallahassee Democrat.
Should be more like, “teaching to question authority instead of blindly accepting it”
I mean, that gets complicated.
I’ve been in classrooms where - say - staunch evangelicals are constantly questioning the authority of a biology teacher as she’s working through the lesson plan. But this tolerance for “questioning authority” only ever seems to swing one way. You won’t see equivalent degrees of tolerance extended to, say, arguing with a gym teacher in an “abstinence only” health class who insists that condoms have a 50% failure rate or a history teacher who keeps rebranding the Civil War as The War of Northern Aggression.