Tea at Trianon: Defining Censorship Down

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, February 10, 2022

Defining Censorship Down

Progressives object to removing porn from schools. From City-Journal:

Finding any pedagogical value in such a text would require a graduate degree. And it’s hard not to question the motives of educators who stocked public school libraries with the book and now insist on its presence in the classroom. But debating with educators and activists whether this or that particular text belongs in the classroom concedes the mistaken notion that they, not the public at large, should decide what children ought to learn.

The tension between parents exercising control over their children’s education on one hand and the whims of zealous bureaucrats on the other is not new. Founders of the country’s public school system, such as Horace Mann, saw educators as a secular priesthood tasked with molding the social values of the young. Without a state-led education system, Mann argued in his 1839 “The Necessity of Education in a Republican Government” address, even “the ablest pastor” will have little luck in shaping the behavior and manners of his congregation. Mann saw adults as having a “fixed character,” unlike children, and compared a church’s efforts in correcting that character to “one solitary arborist working, single-handed and alone, in a wide forest, where there are hundreds of stooping and contorted trees.”

John Dewey elaborated on these themes, seeking to fuse the values of democratic governance and education. Their purpose, Dewey wrote in his seminal Democracy and Education, is to demand a “social return” from the public and to ensure that the “opportunity for development of distinctive capacities be afforded all.” According to Dewey, “The notion that the ‘essentials’ of elementary education are the three R’s mechanically treated, is based upon ignorance of the essentials needed for realization of democratic ideals.”

On this view, public schools are not mere creations of a democratic society subject to popular control. They make democracy attainable and shape the values of future citizens, rendering moral instruction from teachers a necessity. As progressives expand the meaning of “democracy” to include catering to various identity groups, attempts by parents to modify public school curricula have thus come under attack as illegitimate, illiberal, or a threat to the country itself.

In reality, no liberal principles are at stake here. A superintendent removing explicit texts from a mandatory curriculum or school library is hardly censorship. A local school board responding to an outcry from parents is hardly an attack on democratic values. Nobody claims that the Marquis de Sade is being censored because his work is not used in health class or available for checkout. Schools have a finite amount of time and resources each school year to instruct students, and whether children should be exposed to certain texts is ultimately a question of the allocation of taxpayer dollars. (Read more.)

From Sara Carter:

Schools across the country are participating in this week’s national “Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action.” It’s an activist-driven curriculum from the group where children as young as kindergarten are learning things such as “everybody gets to choose their own gender.”
Additional lessons will include disrupting “Western nuclear family dynamics.” The week kicked off Monday and encompasses 13 “Black Lives Matter Guiding Principles” but designed for elementary and middle-school kids.
National Review reports the “principles include a commitment to restorative justice, being transgender affirming and queer affirming, creating space for black families that is ‘free from patriarchal practices,’ and ‘the disruption of Western nuclear family dynamics and a return to the ‘collective village’ that takes care of each other.”

The Black Lives Matter at School website has a “Starter kit” which explains that In addition to 13 principle are four demands: end zero-tolerance discipline policies; mandate black history and ethnic studies; hire more black teachers; and fund counselors, not cops.

One of the participating schools is Centennial Elementary in Denver, Colorado where the lessons will be taught to kindergarteners and first-graders. The school previously made headlines in December after they announced plans for a racially segregated “families of color playground night.” (Read more.)