dirty dictionary games

I must have had a boring childhood because I don't remember reading dictionaries for the purposes of discovering things about sexual positions. But apparently some concerned mother thinks kids can do just that. I guess, with some justification, that a parent can complain about anything that is put forward as material and subject matter in a classroom. That's one of the habits of a free speech society, that it gets exercised in sometimes frustrating, pointless, or mysterious ways, like parents complaining about sex education and evolution or Harry Potter books being in the library and so on. That is: that people will use their free speech in an attempt to deny it to others because of paternalistic grounds.

I am somewhat more alarmed when school districts respond by pulling the books off their shelves. It's bad enough that we have textbooks for elementary kids that basically have to pass muster in Texas. Meaning they cannot cover genocidal practices toward aboriginal peoples, end up talking too much about cowboys and Presidents, and glaze over Reconstruction as a collection of carpetbaggers and scalawags rather than examining the activities, founding, and subsequent suppression by military force of a terrorist organisation known as the Ku Klux Klan and the systematic repression of basic civil liberties for liberated slaves for another 80-90 years, and likewise include very little information on evolution or the philosophical underpinnings of places like Maoist China, the Soviet Union, or basically any place other than the glorious American Empire. I don't think we also need textbooks and reference materials that pass every objection of a parent or guardian. If a parent doesn't want their child to read certain things, that's up to the parent and child to follow through on that. Within certain limits it is unreasonable to expect the school district and board to have to go through and find every possible objectionable line and passage in their libraries and presentations. If something is known to be controversial and objectionable to a sizable subset of the population, it is sensible to make the public aware that it will be coming up or will be available to their children at a particular time, mostly to avoid annoying phone calls later. The attitude being that of "cover your ass". I don't think it is at all appropriate to sit around and extend resources and time into finding a book (in this case, the dictionary) that is somehow unobjectionable to everyone.

I admit this would be somewhat easier if we had more ability to exercise some school choices. Religious fundamentalists or any other people who get creeped out at the thought of their children being aware of oral sex can have schools that don't have this in the curriculum or in their dictionaries and the rest of us can overlook this as something our 4th and 5th graders are unlikely to discover in a gigantic reference book (rather than the university of Google, which amazingly doesn't go straight to oral sex even when you type in "oral". Apparently America is less perverted than I thought or else Google had some agitated parents who complained), and also as something we will probably be willing to allow our teenagers to know about. If still something most parents will be uncomfortable allowing their teenagers to dabble in. I don't object to people who want their children not to be fully educated and aware of the world, provided that they then don't make the same requirements in a (public) school that I might be sending my (mythological) children to.

As an update: it appears the school district has restored the offensive book to the library but now has had to go to the trouble of purchasing an alternative dictionary that somehow omits this distinctly troubling phrase, allows parents the ability to restrict their child's access to that offensive other book (though it is unclear how that access would be actually governed and restricted by school librarians other than simply giving out only the "good book" to everyone who asks for a dictionary, making keeping both of them pointless), and basically showed that being an enormous pain in the ass pays off such that future demonstrations against even more trivial phrases or subjects than even that of oral sex may achieve some modest successes. Well done anonymous mom type person and idiotic school board.