I remember how it was -- JR
Texas High School Put Students on Panel to Review Sexually Explicit Books
A high school principal in Texas slow-walked a review of nearly 200 books in the school library that parents flagged for sexually explicit material, setting a timetable of 22 years to reconsider them, according to documents and emails obtained by The Daily Signal.
Parents in Llano, Texas, told The Daily Signal that they began expressing concerns to Llano High School’s principal in January 2023 about library books rated “adult” by the publishers. Several of the books include extremely graphic sex scenes.
The parents shared their emails to Llano Principal Scott Patrick with The Daily Signal, which has not been able to verify their authenticity independently. The high school didn’t confirm or deny the authenticity of the emails, which also indicate that Patrick included students on a panel reviewing challenged books.
Llano High School serves 529 students in Llano Independent School District, based in Llano, Texas.
On Jan. 17, Bonnie Wallace, the mother of a former student, filed a detailed form, called a “Request for Reconsideration of Instructional Materials” for the book “Call Me by Your Name” by Andre Aciman, which was available for students to check out of the high school library.
Wallace said the book contains explicit sexual scenes that are unsuitable for distribution to minors by a taxpayer-funded school, such as this one on page 144:
I saw one of them enter my room and reach for the fruit, and with the fruit in hand, come to my bed and bring it to my hard c***… and gently press the soft overripe peach on my c*** till I’d pierced the fruit along the crease that reminded me so much of Oliver’s a**.
A Texas bill passed in June 2023, the READER Act, requires public schools to remove books that include material that is “sexually explicit, harmful, pervasively vulgar, or educationally unsuitable” from classrooms and libraries accessible to minors. The law reinforces existing Texas Education Agency policy forbidding schools from providing explicit materials to minors.
Through January, Wallace filed reports on four other books with similar issues for concerned parents.
Patrick didn’t remove the books or respond to the vulgar, sexually explicit paragraphs that Wallace cited in her reports. It appears that the high school’s principal also ignored or disregarded books’ changed statuses as “adult” by publishers and distributors.
The book “A Court of Silver Flames” by Sarah Maas contains multiple scenes in which the narrator describes a character’s request to “f*** me … on this table, on this chair, on every surface in this house.”
Other sexual scenes in Maas’ book are too vulgar for The Daily Signal to print, yet students may read them in Llano High School’s library.
The publisher, Bloomsbury Publishing, changed the rating of the Maas’ entire “Court of Thorns and Roses” series from “young adult” to “adult” in September 2020, as Wallace pointed out to Patrick in an email. As of publication of this story, the designation for “A Court of Silver Flames’” remains “young adult” in Llano High School’s library.
In a January 22 email obtained by The Daily Signal, Patrick laid out for Wallace and other parents how the school district would review the cited books. The principal said he anticipated that process would take “roughly 30 days” for each book. His email suggests that the committee would review books one at a time.
Parents have reported 198 books in Llano High School as violating the Texas Education Agency’s regulation and the Texas READER Act. At a rate of nine working months per year, Patrick’s email suggests that the Llano school district would spend over 22.5 years reviewing the cited books.
On Friday, exactly 30 days later, Patrick informed Wallace of the reconsideration committee’s decision on “Call Me by Your Name,” the first of the concerning books in line.
“The reconsideration committee has voted to remove the book from circulation by a vote of 7:0,” the principal wrote.
Patrick didn’t provide a reason in the email for removing the book, nor did he respond to The Daily Signal’s question about why the book remained on the shelves of his school’s library during the review.
The other books with explicit passages, cited in forms shared by parents, appear to remain accessible to students in Llano High School’s library. The Daily Signal sought to confirm this with Patrick and the school district, but neither responded by publication time.
According to Patrick’s emails, the “book reconsideration” committee included students until a lawyer recommended their removal from the process. It isn’t clear when the school district or the high school selected students to review the sexually explicit books, nor how many students of what ages were recruited.
Neither Patrick nor any other administrator in the Llano school district answered The Daily Signal’s questions about how students found out about the book review committee and were added to it, or why Patrick suddenly removed them.
Patrick told Wallace in a Jan. 31 email: “Students were placed on the committee after the district received parental consent for them to participate.”
In a Feb. 6 email to Wallace, Patrick said of the students on the review committee: “Although their participation is allowed by policy, the district determined it is in their best interest to be removed from the process so that they are insulated from any potential controversy.”
The Llano school district did not confirm the authenticity of the emails and forms sent between Patrick and Wallace.
Assuming the emails are authentic, Patrick may have recognized a potential controversy in asking students, some perhaps minors, to read “adult” books with passages detailing sex, gore, and drug use in vulgar fashion.
The school district’s 2023-2024 Student Handbook bans the use of “profane language” in class and on clothing, which presumably includes vulgar slang for male and female genitalia and sexual acts.
According to parents, Patrick acknowledged receiving complaints highlighting sexual passages in the books. The principal didn’t explain why he didn’t immediately remove the books from the school library until they had been reviewed, given parents’ concerns.
Parents told The Daily Signal that the books remain available in the school library while under review.
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The fight for civilization in higher education
Hatred of Western civilization is the bittersweet of the college curriculum. It is an invasive idea that once ensconced in the classroom strangles every other idea in the minds of many students. It reduces the world into a neat division between the Evil West and the Innocent Rest. In this arrangement, the latter maintain their innocence no matter what they do. Hamas is but the latest beneficiary of this indulgence. Montaigne found nobility in his 1590 essay, “Of Cannibals,” in the Brazilians who cooked their enemies for food. Western intellectuals been busy ever since devising excuses for those who prize primitive appetite over civilized rule.
This romancing of the barbaric is helped along by the ease of finding plenty of episodes in the Western past — and present — in which civilization failed to prevent our descent into horrific acts, or worse, the perpetrators of horrors announced they were indeed the agents of civilization. Were the Argives at Troy civilized? The Athenians of the Peloponnesian wars? There is no shortage of savagery in Western history, up through and including slavery, genocide and world war.
So by what stretch do we call ourselves civilized and mean by that something good? That question is the seed of the bittersweet vine that will strangle all education if we let it in.
Therefore, it is best to answer the question. We are civilized because we recognize a sovereign God of justice and mercy. We are civilized because we recognize that the universe is governed by laws that can be discovered through rational inquiry. We are civilized because we have harnessed the powers of literacy and mechanical innovation. We are civilized because we conceive all of humanity as possessing fundamental dignity. All of these are perfectly good answers and, of course, they are all part of endless and unresolved dispute. To be civilized is to take that dispute seriously. Whether we are under God’s laws or a godless nature’s laws; whether we possess spiritual kinship or merely biological affinity; whether we are accidental “winners” by virtue of guns, germs and steel, or the purposeful champions of higher values, we the civilized are always struggling to say what that means.
The uncivilized are those who sneer at the whole idea. They go for the easy answer that civilization is just the exercise of brute power by those in a position to exert it, though they typically disguise their domination by spreading lies to control the minds of those they oppress.
This is, I confess, a hurried lesson in how the anti-civilization forces have gained ground in higher education. Their primary teaching is that Western civilization is a terrible thing, but its terrors can only be seen clearly by those who have learned how to see through the illusions by which it shields itself from critical examination. The purpose of higher education, in this view, is literally to dis-illusion students. They need to acquire sufficient cynicism to free themselves from Western civilization’s constant efforts to raise itself up as good. “Wokeness” is acquired by spitting at those efforts.
Anti-civilization now has a strong grip on most of our colleges and universities. In what I will venture to call the post-Gay era — as in Claudine, not LGBTQ — however, we are seeing some signs of civilization getting back on its feet. The latest of these is a bill introduced in the Utah legislature, SB-226, which would, to quote Stanley Kurtz, “restore the kind of Great Books curriculum centered on Western civilization, American history, and civics that was central to American higher education until the past few decades.”
The bill, the “School of General Education Act,” has a long way to go before becoming law, but as far as I know, it is the first serious attempt in our era by a state legislature to insist that all students in a state’s public university system take a prescribed sequence of courses that will take them through most of Western history from Homer to Hannah Arendt and beyond. Kurtz’s explanation is better than any I can provide, so I will leave that to him. But I should acknowledge that one of my staff at the National Association of Scholars, David Randall, a historian of Western civilization, is among those who drafted a model curriculum that the Utah legislators appear to have studied.
The prime mover of the Utah legislation is Senate education committee chairman John Johnson, who is an economist and a professor at the John M. Huntsman School of Business at Utah State University. Senator Johnson’s academic position is worth noting because economics — and his specialty, management information systems — is far enough away from the humanities and (the soft) social sciences to be insulated from the worst of anti-Western hysteria that pervades so much of higher education. Who would have thought that an economist would lead the charge to restore the West? That’s easy. Anybody paying attention.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/02/the-fight-for-civilization-in-higher-education
************************************************The NYT finally admits it: Schools are teaching our kids divisive critical race theory
Schools are just teaching honest history.
That’s been the lie educators, teachers unions and the mainstream media have parroted for three years in response to the growing chorus of parents of all political stripes asserting schools are indoctrinating the nation’s children in critical race theory and leftist politics.
Now the paper of record concedes we parents were right.
In a front-page article in Friday’s New York Times, “Ethnic Studies Collides With Israel-Hamas War,” education reporter Dana Goldstein exposes the truth about K-12 education.
The article is ostensibly about the blatant antisemitism embedded in California’s ethnic-studies curriculum, which must be in all public high schools by 2025 and a graduation requirement by 2030.
The legislation was pushed, of course, by the 310,000-member-strong California Teachers Association, the largest affiliate of our country’s largest teachers union, the National Education Association.
As Goldstein reports, pro-Palestinian activism is a core component of the ethnic-studies discipline.
California’s curriculum likens Palestinians to Native Americans, refers to Israel’s founding as “settler colonialism,” categorizes Israeli Jews as “European settlers” and oppressors and harps on the boycott, divestment, sanctions movement.
Goldstein quotes University of California, Riverside, professor Dylan Rodriguez equating teaching Zionism to teaching creationism and climate-change denialism; he “would analogize” learning about Israel’s creation to “learning the history of slavery.”
While the antisemitism embedded in ethnic studies is newsworthy enough, it’s not the big story here.
In a 2022 white paper, “The Very Foundation of Good Citizenship: The Legal and Pedagogical Case for Culturally Responsive and Racially Inclusive Public Education for All Students,” the NEA defines ethnic studies as “the interdisciplinary study of the social, political, economic, and historical perspectives of the United States’ diverse racial and ethnic groups. Ethnic studies helps foster cross-cultural understanding among both students of color and white students, and aids students in valuing their own cultural identity while appreciating the differences around them.”
Goldstein exposes this as a lie.
Ethnic studies, Rodriguez explains, is not “a descriptive curriculum that speaks to various ethnic and racial groups’ experiences.”
It’s “a critical analysis of the way power works in societies.”
Goldstein herself confesses ethnic studies is indeed “ideological” and California’s 700-page model curriculum “retains the discipline’s leftist, activist bent,” asking: “How should millions of California teenagers engage with these explicitly activist concepts in the classroom?”
And now the kicker: Critical race theory and systemic racism are “key concepts in the discipline,” and California’s curriculum includes “gender expression.”
The New York Times — on its cover no less — just confirmed everything parents have been ridiculed, shamed, silenced and labeled domestic terrorists by our own federal government for saying.
Lest one think the discipline is confined to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s progressive paradise and its 1.9 million public high-school students, the Times reports that states across the country are planning legislation to introduce K-12 ethnic studies.
Nor is ethnic studies confined to a single class.
California schools can “incorporate ethnic studies either as a stand-along course or by adding an ethnic studies lens to subjects such as history or literature.” This is key.
American education has been thoroughly corrupted. Schools say they teach English and history, but they don’t.
They use these subjects as props to promote a political agenda.
Math and science aren’t unaffected.
Uber-prestigious boarding school Phillips Exeter Academy offers a course on Mathematics of Social Justice.
Rice University, often called the Harvard of the South, recently made headlines for its new offering, Afrochemistry.
Ethnic studies’ ideology, rooted in critical race theory and based on power dynamics and the oppressor-oppressed dichotomy, is embedded in nearly every K-12 school and university in this country.
It’s the foundation of the diversity-equity-and-inclusion regime implanted in our corporations, military and federal government.
It took the horrific events of Oct. 7 and the explosion of antisemitism in its aftermath for many to wake up to the toxic progressive ideology that’s corrupted our institutions and education system.
Even The New York Times has spoken.
Just as it finally gave us permission to question lab leaks and masks’ utility, acknowledge the harms of school closures and gender-transition surgeries and discuss President Biden’s mental acuity, we now have clearance to talk about our kids’ political indoctrination in polite company.
Let’s hope this spurs more of us to find the courage to speak up and join the fight to take back our schools.
Our country’s survival depends on it.
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My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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