Library Research Notes #28
Learning disruption for political gain
Hello readers! Thank you for joining me, once again, on this research journey. And if you are new here, welcome! I am so happy to have you!
Before we begin, let me express my support for Ukraine during this terrible time. Totalitarianism is a scourge on our world and a threat to global peace. Putin’s brutality and will to power have caused much strife over the years, not only for the citizens of Russia and Ukraine but also for the United States during the 2016 election. The current attack on Ukraine is the culmination of this brutality. We need to stand with Ukraine during this time and do whatever we can to support the Ukrainian resistance. Here are a few links to places where you can donate to help refugees from Ukraine as they flee the war.
International Institute of Buffalo - This organization “has worked to integrate foreign-born Western New Yorkers since 1918”.
UN Refugee Agency - This link will take you to a matching gift fund, set up by Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, matching up to $1 million. (h/t to Chaz for the link)
Thoughts and prayers are good, but actions are even better and any amount helps.
Learning disruption
2022 has been a busy year for the right-wing sector of the Republican party. They have reached way back into the 1980s and 90s for a satanic panic style threat against the education system in the United States and, in turn, caused a disruption of learning that will ripple into the future. Sure, book challenges are a common occurrence, even without the political zealotry of the right-wing, but the onslaught of legislation that has come out of this latest round of book and curriculum challenges is unprecedented.
In January, I truly believed the bills up for debate in Statehouses across the country wouldn’t make it out of their legislative committees, but February has proven that theory wrong with 12 out of the 156 educational gag order bills to be introduced in 39 states becoming laws (source: pen.org.) This is an outright assault on the education system and it is causing many teachers to be fearful of what is to come. A full list of bills, which are being tracked by Jeffrey Sachs and Jonathan Friedman is linked here: PEN America Index of Educational Gag Orders.
What is really going on here?
As George M. Johnson states, in an article on prismreports.org:
“It’s been about protecting white supremacist ideology and the indoctrination of children in the K-12 system with a false, revisionist history of the U.S. that continues to feed systemic oppressions.”
That is quite the mouthful but certainly makes the point clear. Book challenges and bills to restrict specific curriculum materials and topics are merely a way to silence the true history of the United States and continue to inundate students with a white-washed version of our collective history. The ‘protect the children’ argument that is often heard from parents at school board meetings is really only about protecting the children of straight, white, cis folks. The rest of the population of students are not part of the group that these parents care to protect. If they did, they would want the real history of our country to be taught in the schools. But, as it has been since the founding, white, cishet folks are always pushing to keep the mistakes of the white historical figures a secret. This is how white supremacy is maintained. This is why we need to fight against these restrictions. We need to increase the conversations around race and push for the history books to be rewritten without revisionism. We need to actually educate students so that they can be better citizens.
What is stopping progress?
As is so often the case, the legislation and restrictions are merely outcomes of something deeper. The real issue at hand here is empathy, or a lack thereof. When parents at school board meetings say they don’t want their children to hear things in class that will make them feel bad, aren’t they just saying that they don’t want their children to feel empathy? I would go a step further and say that the majority of the parents complaining likely don’t have empathy themselves and this is why they want to maintain the structures as they are. They don’t care about the struggles of others, in the past, and so they don’t have a desire for their kids to care either. This is a sad statement, but I fear it is true.
Lack of empathy is a major problem because you can’t really learn how to be empathetic towards the struggles of others if you never know the stories of those struggles. Educators can’t teach empathy without igniting some feeling of sorrow in a student and this is what the parents are railing against. We saw this lack of empathy during the height of COVID-19 when parents in the same school districts were complaining about mask mandates in the schools. They showed us that they don’t care for anyone, including their own children, when they said they didn’t want their kids to wear masks. This lack of empathy was potentially lethal.
Right-wing media relies on and consistently feeds this lack of empathy in its viewers. Commentators on Fox and other right-wing news sources instill fear and loathing throughout the base. They feed right-wing fear of anyone who is not white, straight, and cis via disinformation. When you have a population of people who care little for anyone but themselves, they are very easy to manipulate, and when they feel like they are becoming the minority, they will do anything they are told to maintain their feeling of superiority.
In a piece by Anne Nelson for the Washington Spectator, she clearly states that the disinformation that has been fed to the public, via right-wing media, is coming from the religious right.
“But the attacks are often rooted in a time-worn playbook that the radical right has used to generate useful controversies for decades. The technique involves identifying—and in some cases, inventing—an inflammatory term that touches a nerve among the target population, and provoking conflict through coordinated local organizing with media amplification.” (washingtonspectator.org)
In the 1980s, the religious right used these tactics to create a wedge issue out of the abortion debate and now, with the exhaustion of COVID, they saw an opportunity to pull back the white women who don’t particularly like Trump, but might vote Republican if given enough disinformation to generate fear. This is where the term “critical race theory” comes into play. Like “partial-birth abortion” several decades earlier, the religious right has latched on to this latest buzz phrase and is using it to sow dissent at the local level, across the country.
Public schools and private interests
After stirring up a frenzy over “critical race theory”, which is not taught or even mentioned in any K-12 classroom in the United States, the religious right has successfully brought white supremacists, suburban mothers, QAnon followers, and Trump voters together to form a coalition that will push for change to the public school system. They will also, likely, vote as a bloc in the mid-term elections, based on fears that are entirely unfounded.
Here in Tennessee, Governor Lee just released his plan for school funding in 2022, which includes a partnership with Hillsdale College, a private university in Michigan that is Christian based. This plan will divert money from the public school system to new charter schools, run by Hillsdale, which means less money for the ACTUAL public schools and charter schools that are basically Christian schools.
What now?
As you can clearly see, there are many layers to this conversation. It isn’t only about a few upset parents at a school board meeting, or people who are tired of wearing masks, or people who believe that their children might have to deal with a little bit of sadness when they learn U.S. history. It is all of these things and more. The GOP has been working tirelessly for over 50 years to maintain their power and, as the U.S. becomes a more diverse society, they are grasping at every opportunity to not lose their grip. But there is hope.
So much information
This month’s topic took me down a deep hole of information and it was quite impossible to share it all above. This just scratches the surface of a larger web of connections between the religious right, the GOP, parent groups, and wedge issues in the United States. It can be quite exhausting to wade through all the media to get to the important parts. I hope I have done the topic justice.
Thank you for joining me on this journey. I send good thoughts to the teachers, professors, and librarians that are dealing with the fallout of this recent wave of challenges and legislation. I am hopeful that educators will be able to continue to teach diverse materials and that they have the support of their administrators in their pursuit of knowledge for all their students. Teachers and librarians have always pushed forward for the good of their students and I have no doubt that they will continue to do so.
As always, if you made it this far, you deserve something positive as a takeaway:
People love libraries and librarians
In the article, State of US Public Libraries – More popular & digital than ever by Nicholas Rizzo, we learn that although physical collection circulation is down across libraries, digital circulation has more than made up for that loss, showing that libraries, contrary to popular opinion, are busier than ever before. People still love reading and these stats prove it.
The number of libraries and librarians has also grown, but one glaring issue (which I am highly privy to since receiving my MLS and starting my job hunt) is that public librarians are paid terribly low for their work. In fact, “library staff are still paid 35.07% below a livable wage for a family of three on average” (wordsrated.com) making it impossible for most librarians to dedicate their full-time efforts to one location. When I lived in Western New York, most of the public librarians I knew who were individual contributors to their income had to have 2-3 library jobs to make ends meet and often looked for work outside of librarianship as a consequence. The pay scale for this highly important job needs to be brought up to the standard it deserves, as do so many public-facing positions in the United States.
From the programming perspective, libraries are also seeing an increase in program attendance with a surge in new programming over the past 20 years. Two stats I found particularly interesting here were for children and teen programming:
Kids reached 81.84 million in 2019, up 16.57% from 2014
Young adults reached 8.89 million in 2019, up 32.79% from 2014.
source: wordsrated.com
Overall, libraries look like they are going to survive. They bridge gaps in the community when it comes to things like access to technology, a safe space for marginalized individuals, collections that engage and educate, and fun things to do for all ages. And, of course, librarians always provide resources that might be restricted elsewhere. The ALA has a code of conduct that includes no censorship of materials and that is a great thing for literature and history. Thanks to librarians, we can be sure that the voices of everyone will live on in the future.
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