{"id":3422,"date":"2023-01-05T03:01:16","date_gmt":"2023-01-05T09:01:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=3422"},"modified":"2023-03-16T21:13:41","modified_gmt":"2023-03-17T02:13:41","slug":"the-us-is-inspiring-education-censorship-elsewhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/?p=3422","title":{"rendered":"The US is inspiring education censorship elsewhere<\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

The US likes to lecture others on democracy and free speech, but is now leading the way on classroom censorship.
\nIn school districts around the United States, book bans are spreading at an alarming rate. PEN America recently\u00a0documented\u00a0more than 2,500 book bans issued across 32 different states during the 2021-22 school year.
\nThese bans are not isolated incidents, but part of a coordinated\u00a0assault on public education\u00a0that\u2019s taking aim at the teaching of race, gender, LGBTQ+ identities and US history.
\nWhile demands to ban books in schools in the US are not\u00a0new, over the last year and a half, book banning has erupted into a national movement. Coordinated and highly organised activist groups have transformed school board meetings into political battlegrounds, threatening educators and undermining students\u2019 freedom to learn.
\nThese\u00a0efforts to censor books\u00a0are an affront to the core principles of free expression and open inquiry that US democracy swears by. But equally worrying is the fact that this pattern of attacks on public education in the US appears to be inspiring similar efforts in other countries, even though such censorship campaigns haven\u2019t had as much success there yet.
\nIn the United Kingdom, officials are\u00a0raising the spectre of critical race theory in schools \u2014 an issue that was not previously a topic of debate or concern \u2014 to try and stop the teaching of histories that explore systemic racism. That\u2019s part of what authors and others have described as a mood \u201cshift\u201d in the UK \u2014 a budding \u201cculture war\u201d that is leading to the\u00a0censorship and removal\u00a0of books from school shelves. Books being removed are often children\u2019s books that look at institutional racism, diversity and LGBTQ+ identities.
\nEchoes of US-based group tactics are also\u00a0manifesting in Canada, with parental groups asking school boards to ban certain books \u2014 again with LGBTQ+ content \u2014 and seeking to\u00a0change curricular topics\u00a0that they see as being part of the teaching of critical race theory. The movement is also gaining the attention of\u00a0politicians. Australia\u2019s Senate\u00a0voted against the inclusion of critical race theory\u00a0in the country\u2019s school curriculum in 2021.<\/p>\n

Aljazeera<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The US likes to lecture others on democracy and free speech, but is now leading the way on classroom censorship. In school districts around the United States, book bans are spreading at an alarming rate. PEN America recently\u00a0documented\u00a0more than 2,500 book bans issued across 32 different states during the 2021-22 school year. These bans are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":3423,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[3575,1407,1399,3160,3576,3574,3465,2732,1408,1198],"class_list":["post-3422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-banned-books","tag-censorship","tag-democracy","tag-discrimination","tag-education-censorship","tag-free-speech","tag-gender","tag-race","tag-school","tag-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3422"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3422\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7787,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3422\/revisions\/7787"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3423"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}