Last year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed HB 1467 into law, which bans pornography and “age-inappropriate” books and requires all reading materials to be “adapted to the needs of students.” But school district administrators have been unclear about how they will determine that. This month [febrero de 2023, AP]school officials have instructed teachers in Manatee and Duval counties to remove books from classrooms or cover them with sheets of paper until districts find a way to ensure that none of the reading materials violate the new law .
In this way, the American journalist and researcher Joan Walsh has summarized the process that state began in March 2022, when the governor signed the HB 1467. The legislation is a true masterpiece of the modus operandi of conservative thought. One of its distinctive characteristics consists of hiding behind noble words and identifying historical facts a political agenda in correspondence with their own aspirations and imaginaries.
About fifteen years ago they named tea party to a populist movement —fundamentally white and even racist— opposed to the agenda of President Barack Obama. They sheltered him after the gesture of civil disobedience against British colonial power carried out by the colonists in Boston Harbor on December 16, 1773. Not long ago they called an extreme right-wing group in the House of Representatives the Freedom Caucus, made up of , among others, by members of the same Tea Party with a peculiar evolution, but now virulently Trumpists.
In effect, the aforementioned law hides itself by establishing that the books used in public schools in the state are free of pornography. The Florida Commissioner of Education, Manny Diaz Jr., you are absolutely correct on this point: “A teacher (or any adult) faces a felony if they knowingly distribute egregious material, such as images depicting sexual assault, bestiality, or sadomasochistic abuse. Who could be against that?” What it hides is that the same law establishes that the texts must be adapted “to the needs of the students.” This is what the detail consists of, and hence the master questions of the case: Who determines what and why?
By mounting on a deliberately vague statement (“the needs of the students”), the floodgate is opened for the de facto power —in this case, of a republican sign— to introduce elements of its social and political program aimed at displacing those of other actors. , especially liberals, often branded with stigmas as “Marxists” and “socialists” without being remotely so.
It is supported by the figure of a “librarian or specialist in school media” who has the last word when determining the books that students should read. In other words, we are talking about an organic technician trained and approved by the Florida Department of Education. Another screen, another fancy little name. It would certainly be called censor in almost any of the cardinal points of the globe.
The administrative power gave a deadline to complete the implementation of the policy on July 1, 2023, when “the superintendent of schools of each district must certify to the Commissioner of the Florida Department of Education that all school librarians and media specialists have completed this training. But since the law was approved and signed, an accelerated process of “adjustment” has been taking place that could not but end up raising concerns and protests among Florida teachers.
At the national level, according to PEN AmericaAs of June 2022, 138 school districts in 32 states had banned 1,648 degrees in 5,049 schools, representing 4 million students. In Florida, in Duval County alone, as of February, 176 books had been taken off the shelves for “review”, not surprisingly related to topics such as Latinos/Hispanics, African-Americans, Arab culture, and various otherness.
The following books are valid only as a sample button: Roberto Clemente, Pride of Pittsburgh Piratesby Jonah Winter, about the Puerto Rican who led the Pirates to two World Series and hit 3,000 hits (he was the first Latino to enter the Hall of Fame); Women Who Broke the Rules: Sonia Sotomayor, by Kathleen Krull, about Puerto Rican-born judge Sonia Sotomayor, the first Latina to serve on the Supreme Court and the third woman to serve there. And two titles that are self-explanatory: Celia Cruz, Queen of Salsa, by Veronica Chambers, and Black Frontiers: A History of African American Heroes in the Old West, by Lillian Schlissel.
A a little later it became known that high school students in Pinellas County would not have access in their classrooms or in their libraries to the first book by the Nobel Prize for Literature Toni Morrison (1931-2019), The Bluest Eye. According to Tampa Bay Timescounty school district officials announced they had withdrawn the book after a review prompted a complaint from a mother, a fundamentalist Christian for whom public schools had become “Marxist indoctrination camps.”
However, on the book’s 50th anniversary, in 2020, The New Yorker He recalled that Morrison’s novel had opened “a new path in the American literary landscape by placing young black women at the center of the story.”
The aforementioned mother shows that the intervention of conservative actors outside the education system is not unusual:
Moms for Liberty [Madres por la Libertad]an ultra-conservative education lobby group also active in the crusade against critical race theory and sex education in schools, is lobbying both districts [Manatee y Duval] to ban several books, including Kite Runner and The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, supposedly because they include rape scenes. Both books are a staple of advanced literature courses. […], which could mean that high-achieving Florida students have less education when they reach college than their peers in other states. The group is also calling for the removal of LGBT-themed books in the lower grades. Broward County has honored some of those requests.
“If I wasn’t living it, I wouldn’t believe what’s happening,” he said. a father who has worked as a substitute teacher. But everything remains between co-religionists. Republican-controlled states, including Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and Texas, have implemented legal procedures to make it easier to remove titles they deem undesirable from school libraries and classrooms in every community. How do you sum it up? Lisa Tolin:
While book recall efforts have intensified over the last year, what is happening now is that the new laws passed last year in Florida are clearly having a chilling effect on teachers and librarians. School districts are interpreting the laws differently, but some teachers have been told they must suspend access to their classroom libraries so that a media specialist can review each book for approval first. If they don’t comply, they could risk losing their teaching license or even being charged with a felony if they are found to be in violation of one of these new laws.
As for DeSantis, he appears to be locked in a photo-finish with Greg Abbot, the governor of Texas, not only in this but in many other areas. An additional detail: according to a Pen America report (2022), Florida has the second highest number of book bans in the entire Union, second only to Texas.
how to write a pedagogue:
All the elements are in place to produce pedagogical forms of repression that include the denial of history, hence the emergence of a pedagogy of historical amnesia; a denial of the power of social structures to produce massive degrees of inequality in wealth and power; the absolute individualization of the agency and a continuous attempt to depoliticize the youth, above all through a pedagogy of manufactured ignorance; the refusal to recognize how identities and social structures are fused together; a notion of community organized around fear and intolerance; and an obsession with power and its authoritarian implementation by destroying the institutions that promote engaged citizenship.
The word that comes to mind is Gleichshaltungthe German term used for ‘bring into conformity’”, he concluded.
