Originally Posted by carlsonjok
Strawman. Those are bumper stickers, not guidelines that can be used by teachers and administrators to make good faith decisions about what to teach. Curriculum guidance needs to be detailed enough that a random sample of educators would come to essentially the same decisions. This law doesn't do that. Quite the opposite, as we are seeing play out in real time. How should a bill affecting curriculum should be constructed. I would say that it isn't a list of what is disallowed, but rather an outline of what is allowed. For the topic of racial discrimination what are the subtopics that can be covered and what evidence introduced to illuminate those topics? Can current events be covered? Etc.
I am not sure who you are responding to here, because it isn't me. I never said books were banned. I said that, faced with ambiguity, educators are erring heavily on the side of caution and pulling anything that could even result in some fired up parent wasting their morning complaining about CRT infiltrating the schools because a book points out Dixie Walker's role in the integration of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Textually, no. And I am certainly not advocating for an abridgement of the people's First Amendment rights, if that is what you are setting me up for here. What I am concerned about is that this bill makes all curriculum subject to the heckler's veto. At some point, you have to stop privileging ignorance. And a properly constructed and detailed curriculum is a good first step.
One man's recitation of facts is another man's advocacy. Take my voter ID example.It is a demonstrable fact that Voter ID laws disenfranchise minority voters because those voters disproportionately do not have the required ID. That is just a statement of fact. And look at how that spun off into it's own argument. Now imagine how that plays out when it involves real educators and real parents, not just a bunch of baseball card collectors wasting time on a discussion board.
I did myself no service by how I stated that earlier. My apologies. My preference is that this language, along with the language about psychological distress, not appear in the bill whatsoever, because it privileges unprovable claims over demonstrable facts and opens it up for the introduction of absurdities.
This is exactly the type of absurdity I am talking about. Bull Connor was a racist. Racism is prejudice against a person because of their race. Bull Connor was white. Bull Connor was a white supremacist. Are educational outcomes actually improved by dancing around the obvious?
And, to restate myself, the advocates should be less concerned about what it says and more concerned about how what it doesn't say can be used to strategically create chaos. Which is already happening.
And, in my opinion, the right would be much better served when they realize that stunts like this bill aren't meant to solve a problem, but rather keep Ron DeSantis' name in the news and burnish his credentials as a culture warrior in advance of the 2024 GOP Presidential primary.
If teaching about racism was solely about teaching that it is wrong to be prejudiced against someone because of their race, it would be a 30 second conversation. The history of racism in the US, though, is about racism coupled with control of the levers of power that enables someone to act on that prejudice under the color of law. And that is not a solved problem. To be sure, it is certainly better than it was in the 1860s and also the 1960s. But, it isn't solved. We still have to create a more perfect union. But, is it any less advocacy to teach the comfortable fiction that we have truly achieved a color-blind society?
In sum, I think we are each talking about a different topic. While you are talking about what is within the four walls of the bill, I am talking about what happens out in the wild as a result of the bill. You are asking "Does this sound reasonable?" and I am asking "how can someone abuse this bill in service to some other agenda?" I am not sure how we reconcile that.
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