Why are elected officials and parents "external parties" to the education of their children, while librarians are.. "internal"? What gives one, but not the other, the moral authority to decide what kind of education to give children (compelled by law to attend public school)?
Librarians actually read the books and are experts in the curation of the books. It is not actually about moral authority it is about expertise.
Special accommodations are made for students. Parents can ask for their child not to participate in activities they deem inappropriate. I see this happen all of the time during Halloween events. It would be nice if Christian conservatives would do the same.
> It is not actually about moral authority it is about expertise.
I sure am glad that there is an Objectively Correct set of books children should be exposed to, unaffected by issues of identity, politics, or morality, and it's just a matter of applying dispassionate expertise to discover it.
And of course, that this is what librarians are doing, and not letting their personal beliefs interfere.
It sounds like you are trying to say there is no such thing as expertise. These people have degrees in education and/or library science. Why bother going to university to learn anything then?
No, I am saying there is no such objectively correct set of books. Hiding behind "expertise" doesn't make educational decisions less political. Children can be indoctrinated more, or less, "expertly".
But then everyone knows this, and I don't for a second believe you or anyone else thinks school librarians make decisions entirely based on universal (i.e. not specific to any country, ethnic group, or political persuasion) dispassionate principles. You're only pretending to to win an argument, then you'll go right back to believing the opposite, and call for libraries to be "decolonized" [1].
I guess we're lucky libraries are expert and objective now, unlike how they were 3 years ago when they were biased and needed decolonizing. Except the ones that haven't decolonized yet, of course. Those librarians' expertise and judgment can still be questioned.
There is a difference between a professional academic librarians managing a collection and political activists suppressing societal critiques and marginalized identities.
The reference you posted is about collection management at libraries London School of Economics in England. England has different history with respect to colonization than the US. A sordid history in-fact. We are also talking books for adults not children under 18.
The US itself is was decolonization project. I hope you know that colonialism is rarely judged a good thing in modern scholarship.
> There is a difference between a professional academic librarians managing a collection and political activists suppressing societal critiques and marginalized identities.
Yes, the difference is the political activism of librarians is institutionalized [0]. You don't view the absence of Jared Taylor's "White Identity", or any similar book, from school libraries, as "suppressing societal critiques", do you? Why, because it's done quietly and tacitly?
It's so funny seeing the same people complaining how every institution is systemically racist or whatever-ist (including math [1,2] - I made sure links are for the US, since apparently that is such a special case that critiques of institutions in even the most closely related countries are completely inapplicable to it), then turn around and claim that "no, this institution that does what I like is beyond politics, driven by pure expertise", even in a field as fuzzy and political as child education.
> The reference you posted is about collection management at libraries London School of Economics in England.
Thank you for this uselessly reductive interpretation. While yes of course libraries in those other, lesser countries are politicized and in need of correction, libraries in the US are objective and beyond reproach - unless [3] that [4] reproach [5] comes [6] from [7] the [8] left [9,10,11].
When activists lobby to change institutions how I like, this is good and necessary - those institutions are systemically racist, colonialist, and biased!
When activists lobby to change institutions how you like [12], this is bad and political - those institutions are dispassionate, apolitical, objective experts!
[12] I don't actually like it, I just don't fool myself into thinking what librarians are doing is any different. If anything, it is worse, since it is invisible and unchallenged.
