Bad Influence.

[email protected]

1984, Fahrenheit 451, To kill a mockingbird and several others were among the banned books in my school.

Ironically tho, Mein Kampf was still sitting proudly on the shelf. Of a middle school library...

[email protected]

I don't follow american book ban list. Is it actually ban?

[email protected]

This is literally what YouTube is like though. The less educational content is, the more likely they are to remove or age restrict it. NileGreen made a video about this recently, it's kinda long but you can watch it if this sounds interesting.

[email protected]

That's funny, they were both required reading where I am in the U.S.

[email protected]

I don't think it's currently on any ban lists in the US; if it is, it's just in a few odd corners. It has been on ban lists around the world in the past for various reasons.

[email protected]

It comes down to framing. You put Animal Farm (unapologetically anti-Soviet Union) and 1984 (more broadly anti-authoritarian) on the required reading list for high schools. You haven't provided any education around Marxist theory anywhere in the curriculum besides "communism bad". That lets you transfer the idea that the USSR is representative of all leftist thought, and these books are about the USSR. Breeze over all the stuff in 1984 that points to any kind of leftist theory--which Orwell helps with because he expects people to get bored and skip that whole bit--and boom, Orwell becomes an anti-leftist icon.

If Homage to Catalonia were also added to the curriculum, this whole farce would be torn down.

fxomt

True. without much context other than knowing animal farm was written against the soviet union for example, it's easy to think that.

Orwell becomes an anti-leftist icon.

Honestly this is a really interesting phenomenon, where very famous figures being leftist/socialist is conveniently left out. MLK, Einstein, Orwell, Picasso, Nelson Mandela. They were all socialists yet that is not taught.

[email protected]

1984 is more appropriate for adolescents than for kids under tweens. If anyone has read the ending, the imagery in Room 101 is pretty graphic. There are also sexually suggestive imagery in the middle of the book.

The best dystopian book for kids that warns of authoritarianism would be Fahrenheit 451 and Animal Farm imo. The latter was my introduction to George Orwell by my teacher just before I entered adolescence.

[email protected]

Banned in the USA: Beyond the Shelves - PEN America

This report on book bans in the 2023-24 school year documents how censorial trends have continued to ripple beyond the shelves.

PEN America (pen.org)

Disproportionate to publishing rates and like prior school years, books in this prominent subset overwhelmingly include books with people and characters of color (44%) and books with LGBTQ+ people and characters (39%).

Over half (57%) of the banned titles in this subset include sex-related themes or depictions, due to ramped up attacks on “sexual content.”

Nearly 60% of these banned titles are written for young adult audiences, and depict topics young people confront in the real world, including grief and death, experiences with substance abuse, suicide, depression and mental health concerns, and sexual violence.

If you pick around for schools with bans, you can occasionally find 1984 on the list. But that is primarily because of the extramarital sex scene between Wilson Smith (the protagonist) and his lover Julia.

[email protected]

I watched the library in my high school downsized repeatedly during and after my time in school.

They went from half a dozen librarians to one. They purged their collections of microfilm and whittled away any research tools that weren't just on a computer. They stopped ordering new books for the most part by the time my sister graduated.

I believe they've since renovated the space to convert a big chunk of it into more classrooms.

[email protected]

everybody knows they are supervised and fear the supervisors

They regularly saw friends and neighbors persecuted by police. We don't really see that in the modern day. There's no cop who bangs on your door because you did a wrongthink online.

[email protected]

I suppose I'm thinking of pre teens. It has explicit sex, as well as IIRC pretty strong description of how the main character is broken down by the torture. Even without the detail, the rawness of the theme's presentation feels more than I'd want to give a 6 year old, even an 11 year old. Animal farm is much tamer, even if, properly interpreted, it's just as brutal!

I don't know where I'd draw the boundary, if I were deciding. For that matter I don't think I agree with book censorship anyway: at 6 your parents should be protecting you more than the library rules. Maybe don't have it on the shelf next to Famous Five though?

Flying Squid

If there is a pre-teen able to read and understand Orwell's language, and there are precious few of those, I think they could handle the sex and the torture. As the cartoon suggests, they're seeing it on the internet regardless.

[email protected]

Every big tech company has bent the knee to trump. While I don't find it likely that widespread crackdown would happen because someone shit talked cheeto Hitler, it's not beyond the realm of possibilities. At the very least, it's more plausible that he might use connections to dig up dirt on political enemies.

[email protected]

Middle school is mid teens, right? I interpreted those children in the comic as younger.

[email protected]

I disagree. The intelligence to understand the language is separate from the maturity to handle the content.

And yes they're seeing things on the internet... and shouldn't be. That's a long-standing debate in society about how heavily to shield them from it. But do you think the fact an 8 year-old might see awful things on tiktok means there's no value in telling them to wait a few years before reading a book like 1984?

Flying Squid

What 8-year-old is reading any Orwell? You're talking about something that is probably an issue for .00001% of people at that age. Like 3 or 4 prodigies. So why do these bans which, again, do not differentiate between 7 and 17, need to be in place?

Also, where are the parents of these 8-year-olds? Shouldn't they be aware of what their child is getting from the library?

[email protected]

It sounds like we're talking cross purposes now. I don't know what children are reading Orwell. Not like in the comic, I imagine. For that matter, I hope most children are not, in fact, seeing videos of cats being killed.

[email protected]

The UK CPS would like a word with you concerning your problematic online speech....

MacN'Cheezus

I mean, it's literally the premise of this comic that the kid goes to a library that has already banned the book. How does he know it exists at all? And if he thinks he ought to be able to get it at the library, why wouldn't he think of trying to find it on the Internet instead?

Kids these days were literally born after the iPhone was invented, they have never even known a time where you couldn't access the Internet from almost anywhere in the world using a device small enough to fit in your pocket, and somehow you think they'd be too stupid to even try?