Except the definition used in the article, a ban is when a parent group disagrees with the authorities (the librarians) and does not want the book in a tax-payer funded library: "PEN America defines a school book ban as any action taken against a book based on its content and as a result of parent or community challenges, administrative decisions, or in response to direct or threatened action by governmental officials, that leads to a book being either completely removed from availability to students, or where access to a book is restricted or diminished."
So if a librarian goes to a conference and learns, "hey we need to remove these books from the lirbary because they are bigoted/racist/problematic" and they do so, that is not a book ban. But if parents say, "hey this book is not appropriate for our kids, this should not be in a school library", and they raise hell to get it removed, that is a book ban. The whole framing is dumb.
Reminder: a "book ban" is simply when a there is book that is acclaimed by the establishment, available in book stores across America, on the shelves of thousands of school libraries, but somewhere, some school board, or parent group does not want it in their curriculum or a tax-payer funded library. A "book ban" is parents and taxpayers overriding curation the decisions of government librarians.
It is simply a Russell conjugation: librarians curate books; parents and school boards ban books.
Personally, I don't trust librarians or school boards, and I put a lot of work into curating reading material for my own children. Many of the books I value are out-of-print, or unavailable in any public library, whereas almost all these so-called "banned books" are available in most public libraries. So yeah, these lists get a giant eye-roll from me.
I love this. People completely uneducated in the field in question (in this case education and library science) thinking they know more about a subject than the people with degrees from actually universities who studied the topic.
The argument is that producing children has massive positive externalities; there is value created for society that is not captured by the parent. In economics terms, all gains-from-trade for the child's future labor is a positive for society that the parent will not capture. Or for illustration, imagine nobody had any children. You would get to retirement age and find you could not buy food because there was no one to farm, you could not get healthcare because there were no more doctors and nurses or construction workers to build hospitals.
Of course the tricky thing is that not all children produce positive externalities, some have massively negative externalities and a naive subsidy might encourage the wrong kind of reproduction ...
Anyways, if you don't want any subsidies, one policy change is to eliminate general social security and simply have each retiree get the social security money paid only from their own children. Social security is not a savings plan or insurance, what it actually is is a socialized version of the current generation of children paying for their parents retirement. The non-socialized version is just the parents getting money of the kids that they raised themselves, and if you did not put in the work of raising kids, you don't get social security.
- Fewer parents active in overseeing the schools, volunteering to fix up the community, etc.
- Less general slack for parents to help each other out
- Fewer mom friends around during the day, less social life for existing stay-at-home moms
- Peer pressure and implicit societal pressure to work a career
- Parents sending their kids to camps and aftercare, rather than having kids free-range around the neighborhood and play with friends, so fewer playmates for the non-camp/non-daycare kids.
because it will show how much an economy can grow when women are allowed to work to their full potential.
Disagree. Everyone needs to realize that having two parents who both have "greedy jobs" is a path to misery. Giving out childcare does not change the situation. One parent will always need to step back from their career or there will be misery, I've seen too many cases. Even if both parents are comfortable putting their kid in daycare 9 to 11 hours a day (to cover both the workday and the commute), which they should not be, they still have to deal with many sick days, needing to be out of work by 6pm every day, not going on business trips, teacher's conferences, school plays, PTA meetings, not getting a good night sleep because baby or toddler is having a sleep regression, etc. etc. There is no world where you provide everyone universal childcare and now both parents can "work to their full potential" and "give the economy their best."
The reality furthermore is that there are few non-greedy jobs that are non-subsidized/non-fake and that contribute to the economy enough to be of more value than childcare. Subsidizing childcare, so the second parent can get a non-greedy job as a neighborbood coffeeshop owner, or working as a strict 9-5 government lawyer, isn't really a win for the economy.
Not sure about your point. I live in Europe, and State pays for the first 1 year or two. Then you get your kid to preschool which is either paid or free. In this way the mother (who usually has more burden related to breastfeeding etc.) can finally breathe freely. Can she go to work? Yes, and in some Europaen countries she has the right to ask for part work with the current employer, and they can't refuse. A few years later the kid goes to school (again, paid or free) and parents can decide how they organize their lives based on their needs an expectations. If your kid is sick, you can stay with them, and I always assumed this is normal and civilized way, I can't imagine otherwise.
The post I was replying to said that free parental leave would allow parents to "give their best to the economy" and reach their "full potential" at the career. To me that implied American work culture and "greedy jobs." (Google the term, there has been a lot of commentary on it).
From what I understand, most European countries optimize for something like "cozy economic conditions" rather than "maximizing economic potential" so neither my comment or the comment I was replying to would apply Europe. What I have seen in the U.S. is misery resulting from two parents working greedy jobs, like one is a high-powered lawyer, the other is engineer at a startup and then having a baby or 1 year old or two year old in daycare. One is a sales rep, the other is working a political campaign. What do you do when baby is sick and dad has to make sales quota and mom has a deadline for engineering documents that the entire construction project is bottlenecked on? What do you do when both parents need to stay late at the office, one to finish the legal docs big deal, the other to make a product launch deadline? Stress and fights over whose job is the most important results. What if baby is sick and waking up at night every 30 minutes? Who gets to be sleep deprived?
Then you get your kid to preschool which is either paid or free. In this way the mother (who usually has more burden related to breastfeeding etc.) can finally breathe freely. Can she go to work? Yes, and in some Europaen countries she has the right to ask for part work with the current employer, and they can't refuse. A few years later the kid goes to school (again, paid or free) and parents can decide how they organize their lives based on their needs an expectations. If your kid is sick, you can stay with them, and I always assumed this is normal and civilized way, I can't imagine otherwise.
I am curious though, would this job that mom goes back to actually be more "productive" than taking care of a four year-old and two-year old human child?
> I am curious though, would this job that mom goes back to actually be more "productive" than taking care of a four year-old and two-year old human child?
Actually, any job she likes? In this case, it's not for the baby, it's for her. Being with a child 24/7 has its toll, and people are social animals, they like being with others. In this case, work - especially white collar - is a kind of rest for parents. At least this is the attitude of many fresh mums (and dads) around me.
Taking care of a baby can be very social ... as long as the other mother's aren't all at work.
And what exactly are these jobs that are a rest compared to taking care of a baby? Are they actually economically productive or are they bureaucratic fake jobs?
I have noticed that many of my peer parents make parenting more stressful than it needs to be, and don't invest enough in learning techniques to make it less stressful. Like, some parents don't even invest in baby-proofing and then they are constantly chasing their toddler around. But, the first year of baby is always going to be stressful because everything is so new, just as the first year at a brand new job is always going to be more stressful than a job one is highly experienced at.
The live-in nanny. A high-paid lawyer and a sr software engineer together make, let's presume they make $500k/yr combined. They should take some of that money and hire someone else to do it for them. The question shouldn't be to compare one mom's job vs taking care of two children, there should be a team of professional adults taking care of a cadre of children. Amortized over that, the numbers look a bit better.
Look up how much housing costs, and how much professional nannies cost, in a location where the software engineer and lawyer are making $500k combined. And you'll need at least two nannies, one overnight, one during the day. I don't think the math is going to work out very well. Also, there are a lot of greedy jobs that don't pay nearly as well as $250k, especially early in career.
I was with you til the end, so now I need to ask what you really mean by "greedy jobs". I took it to mean jobs that are all-consuming, no fixed hours, high pressure, high stress. If that is what you mean then I seriously doubt your claim that there are few non-greedy jobs that contribute to the economy. The vast majority of jobs are non-greedy by this definition, unless the US has really regressed so far from Europe as to be unrecognisable.
If that is what you mean then I seriously doubt your claim that there are few non-greedy jobs that contribute to the economy.
What I said is "that contribute to the economy enough to be of more value than childcare" Picking up trash or painting houses are important jobs that contribute to the economy, but they are not more valuable than caring for children nor do they pay more, so there is little point in a second parent going back to work as a house painter and then paying for daycare, or having the state subsidize daycare.
In a medium cost-of-living city in America, two kids in daycare will cost $40k-$45k. There aren't many non-greedy, non-sinecure/subsidized jobs that will pay enough after taxes and commute costs to make entering the workforce worth it. And I don't see the point in actively subsidizing the childcare versus giving all parents some assistance and then letting them choose the more economically efficient path.
I don't want to optimize for the economy... but if I did ...
Instead of having the second parents work the non-greedy job painting a house or what-not, and then third-parties working in the child care industry ... just have the second parent take care of their own children and the third-parties painting the houses or what not. Your equation leaves out that the parent taking care of their own kid frees up the workers from the daycare industry to do something else. So their is no net loss in output. It only is a net loss if daycare is so much more efficient at taking care of kids that one day-care worker can free up multiple parents to work non-greedy jobs, but when you look at the all-in costs of daycare including administration and facilities and floaters that is not really the case.
No, because you have to count all the employment going into running and supplying the daycare, which includes facilities, equipment, administration, extra staff, etc. You have to look at the all-in cost.
I've never seen a daycare with more than 5% of staff doing admin. Either it's a small daycare with a handful of workers and everybody doing care, or it's a large one with one person doing admin.
It all adds up. On average, daycare in USA costs $18k a year per child ( https://www.care.com/c/how-much-does-child-care-cost/ ), which is the best measure of the total resources that it takes up, all-in. Median income for a 30yo man is $55k and for a woman $45k. So even with just two kids, the lower earning parent with the non-greedy job is not clearing much if anything over the cost of the daycare.
I dislike the perversity of taxing people than only giving the money back to them if they arrange their life in a way that policy-makers prefer (two income family). I especially dislike it when the subsidized choice of institutional childcare is more inefficient (paying for a lot of overhead), worse for the environment (extra people commuting), and worse for the kids (kids in groups that are classes that are too large for their age, taken care of by a rotating cast of minimum wage workers instead of by their own parent). And yes, I think parents who successfully home-school their children should be given the money that government schools would have cost them.
This strikes me as part of the disease of thinking like a tax payer and not a citizen. It's about the service/resource availability, not the money. And your system seems to create more perversion than what you're reacting to - a bunch of people keeping score to make sure they get theirs.
In AZ we offer ESA to homeschoolers, vouchers to charter or private school kids, and then normal tuition free public schools.
That way the service/resource is available to all children regardless of who the parent picks to provide it, according to what the family sees as their best option. It's not about who gets the money, just that the resources are available.
I think very rarely does the state or society have a better view in aggregate of what is best for each family, particularly when you consider the asymmetry of millions of families having time and information to contemplate their circumstance vs voters or bureaucrats having complete inability to put any real thought on the child on a per-child basis.
- Extra-staffing of floaters to be able to give staff breaks or handle staff sick days or workers quitting
- Taxes
- Insurance
- Administrative staff to handle billing and compliance
- Facilities -- Rent, maintenance, HVAC. Adding to this, the facility might have to use expensive first floor space because the regulation requires them to be able to easily evacuate kids who can't down stairs on their own.
- Profits/Owner-operator salary (anyone who can own and operate a successful high-quality day-care with five classrooms could command 6 figures salary on the private market)
Yeah, I've wondered if there is some sort change in how people think about and label their activities. Would a 1950s parent even think of themselves as doing a defined activity called "childcare"? Or rather, the children are just around, as the parent is doing things. If I am cooking dinner while a toddler putters around the floor and a baby is in a high-chair eating scraps I give him, am I doing "childcare"? Would a 1950s parent think of that as doing "childcare"?
Toddlers don’t just putter around. They want to be wherever you’re at doing whatever you’re doing and opening all the cabinets and boxes and pulling everything out to look at it. I think people were more apt to put them to work around the house in the past whereas now people infantilize them more. My son doesn’t speak very well as a 19 month old but he understands a lot and pays attention, and right now we’re trying to figure out how to put him to work in the kitchen and around the house so he feels involved and we get what little help he is able to contribute.
I remember teachers in my school having a poor opinion, dissuading us from reading contemporary books. I'm still not convinced on their rationale.
That's funny, what I am hearing from high school students is that overwhelmingly the curriculum has been replaced by contemporary books. Few seniors I talk to have read anything in school written before 1900. Maybe they read one or Shakespeare in the modern English version. There seems to be a lot of assigned books written in recent years, often some sort of depressing coming of age story.
I think English class should be a mix of core classics, plus books that students can pick out to read on their own and then do a report on. For the independent reading, students could pick out Harry Potter or a compelling young adult fiction.
But English at its best should also be connecting us to a common culture that we share with our parents and our ancestors, who are the people that built everything around us. These are books that we might not pick out to read on our own, but society as a whole is better off if everyone reads them and they are part of our common culture. However, I think Gatsby and a lot of high school books actually fail this test. I do like Shakespeare
> Game Of Thrones
I think this is a bad choice for a number of reasons. First, I'd worry it would be corrosive to the morals of my teenagers. Second, it tries to be "gritty realistic" in its medieval setting but actually a lot of that setting and psychology of the characters is not at all realistic. Third, I wouldn't trust any high school teacher to be able to highlight these things and build effective lessons from it.
"often some sort of depressing coming of age story."
I think that while this isn't anywhere near the whole problem, the selection of books is very slanted in certain directions and that is a part of the problem. I'd call it "politics" but people would think I mean left/right, but that's not really what I'm referring to here... there are definitely some tendencies in the books chosen by literature teachers, by the type of people who would become literature teachers, and while there's nothing intrinsically wrong with that, they can end up badly overrepresented.
You've got the broody coming of age stories (which is basically synonymous with "discovering how awful the world is"), the stories about how awful everything is and particularly how awful mankind is, the poems about how depressing everything is, the stories about how nihilistic the author is, the stories that make minimal sense on their own because they are just carrying "literary" symbolism as they make a depressing literary point, etc.
A bit more diversity in some of the literature lists wouldn't go amiss... and again, I'm not really talking about "left/right" or the modern sense of the term, but just, casting a wider net in the general sense. It is not actually illegal or unethical for students to maybe occasionally enjoy a book in school. It is not invalid to maybe study a comedy, an actually funny comedy, in the pursuit of learning about humor, for instance.
>These are books that we might not pick out to read on our own, but society as a whole is better off if everyone reads them and they are part of our common culture.
This, we already lose a lot by not being familiar with the canon that well educated students were learning in the past, we shouldn't shrug off the more recent canon that we share with our parents and grandparents. It's the same reason a lot of irreligious people still take time to learn some of the basic stories from the bible, there is so much christian influence in our society that you miss out if you aren't at least a little familiar with the mythology that things are based on or referencing.
I think Game of Thrones is actually a great example of why we shouldn't be teaching Game of Thrones... I made a historical reference to Savonarola the other day, and when the person didn't know what I was talking about, I said "You know when the religious zealots in GoT take over the city..." GoT is really at it's best if you have an understanding of English history (War of the Roses, etc) such that you can pick up on where all of the references come from - I have no idea if Martin intended Savonarola as his muse, but my point is that historical references and books of the past are the foundation blocks of modern literature and cultural references, so I'd much rather see them taught, as the kids can pick up on modern lit on their own.
Yes, everyone I've talked to about this has said it's all contemporary literature now. One mother was telling me her son is bored in literature class because the books all have female protagonists now. Much like in modern movies, it seems some schools/teachers are trying to make up for there being too many boy-centric stories in the past by making it all girl-centric today. Unfortunate that they aren't trying to find a balance.
One thing that's popular in the schools in my area now could be called "death studies": taking a semester to read and write things about death, even visiting cemeteries and other death-related activities. While I'm sure some of it is very interesting and engages some kids who were bored by the usual material, it seems like it could be dangerous for some teens to spend a lot of time thinking about death for a few months. But the parents who've mentioned it all think it's "cool" and have no concerns about that.
Who in 2025 is actually against putting Lord of the Rings in the curriculum because it is too "popular" or not old enough? It's the same age as a lot of other classic high school texts (1984, Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, etc.) And I think it's quality is actually even more appreciated now than when it became popular. It seems like it is just inertia keeping it out, plus most of the people who want to reform the curriculum want newer books than Lord of the Rings.
That is true! From what I have seen and heard from the schools around me, every year the assigned texts are getting shorter and with a lower reading level.
So if a librarian goes to a conference and learns, "hey we need to remove these books from the lirbary because they are bigoted/racist/problematic" and they do so, that is not a book ban. But if parents say, "hey this book is not appropriate for our kids, this should not be in a school library", and they raise hell to get it removed, that is a book ban. The whole framing is dumb.