What kids are reading

Plus: Weird Donne, in defense of markets and more

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In Bookriot, Danika Ellis reports on a new function that Follett Learning has been developing to add to their library management system, Destiny. It will allow parents to see and restrict what books their children check out from the library. Ellis, of course, sees this as a terrible development. What could be worse than allowing parents to be involved in their child’s education?:
Systems like this are most harmful for the students who need access to books and other library resources the most: queer kids and teens whose parents are unsupportive, students looking for safer sex information, children with…

In Bookriot, Danika Ellis reports on a new function that Follett Learning has been developing to add to their library management system, Destiny. It will allow parents to see and restrict what books their children check out from the library. Ellis, of course, sees this as a terrible development. What could be worse than allowing parents to be involved in their child’s education?:

Systems like this are most harmful for the students who need access to books and other library resources the most: queer kids and teens whose parents are unsupportive, students looking for safer sex information, children with abusive parents looking for resources to keep themselves safe, and more. For these students, the library could be the safest place they can go, and this would cut off that lifeline.

It also will likely be ineffective. The parents who show up with poster boards and a cheering section in school board meetings are unlikely to be happy to just place a restriction on their own kids’ account. The language around this most recent flood of book banning has been about “grooming,” “pedophilia,” and “sexualization,” and it paints these books as dangerous for kids. It’s about removing them entirely. Parents have always had the option to pay attention to what their kids check out from the library.

Most likely, kids who want to read books about sex won’t check them out anyway, as Ellis later acknowledges, but will either read them in the library or steal them, so it’s unclear if this new tool will change much in terms of the behavior of children.

What this tool will do is prevent teachers from—or at least give them pause before—forcing children to read pro-trans propaganda their parents would prefer they not read. Kids reading stuff their parents don’t want them to read is as old as reading itself. What is marginally new is the degree to which some educators (and let’s be honest, it is some, not most—the majority of teachers care deeply about the children they have under their care) view it as their duty to corrupt children.

Ellis is worried that parents may lobby for books to be removed from the school library, too, and they may, but this is their right as taxpayers. Democracy is inconvenient sometimes.

Ellis goes on to point out that the parent company of Follett has developed software that foreign countries have used to spy on their citizens. That may make Follett a bad actor, but it’s silly to suggest that providing parents with tools to know what their children are reading is part of some global suppression of freedom.

In other news

Speaking of education, Naomi Schaefer Riley reviews Nate G. Hilger’s The Parent Trap:

In his new book, The Parent Trap, Hilger proposes a “Familycare” program that would “cost something like 2 percent of GDP,” an expenditure he characterizes as “modest.” Indeed, it could hardly be unreasonable, he says, to devote such resources to helping families when we spend 3.2 percent of GDP on the military: “If we want, we can think of Familycare like a new military, but instead of protecting us from foreign threats, Familycare protects us from a dire domestic threat—the destruction caused by foregone investments in children’s skill growth.” If all this sounds like the kind of thing an earnest high-school student might say in a debate, keep in mind that Hilger was an adviser to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign.

Metaphor alert: Marina Abramović falls asleep a mere five minutes into her reenactment of “The Artist is Present.” She is bringing the show back to support Ukraine.: “Two stylish twenty-somethings on an apparent date chuckled politely and began theorizing about how the performance was genius in its rebuke of the spectacularization and commercialization that overshadowed Abramović’s prior work.”

A dog robot patrols Pompeii: “The Boston Dynamics’ canine robot, known as Spot, is now patrolling archaeological areas and structures at Pompeii in Italy, the Archaeological Park of Pompeii announced in a release on Monday. The agile robot is being used to identify structural and safety issues at Pompeii—an Ancient Roman city encased in volcanic ash following the 79 C.E. eruption of Mount Vesuvius— such as narrow passages and uneven surfaces, while also inspecting underground tunnels leading to and from the site that were dug by thieves to steal (and later sell) ancient relics.”

Weird Donne:

What would it be like to be swallowed by a whale? Disappearing into the huge maw of a sea giant has made for thrilling and terrifying narratives, from the biblical story of Jonah to Melville’s Moby-Dick and Walt Disney’s Pinocchio. But here’s a stranger idea: what if you were already living inside a whale but didn’t realise it, so vast were its cavernous insides? For an idea this odd and haunting, you would have to look to the works of John Donne and, more specifically, to what is by far his most bizarre poem, “Metempsychosis”, which tells the story of the migration of a single soul from entity to entity, from the apple picked by Eve in Eden through a head-spinning range of animal and human creatures. It’s as part of this hallucinogenic bestiary that we encounter the whale, with its pillar-sized ribs and “thunder-proof” hide, and are told that “Swim in him swallowed dolphins, without fear,/And feel no sides, as if his vast womb were/Some inland sea.”

The novelist Christopher Beha talks to Mary Grace Mangano about illness, writing, and faith. He is currently working on a new book on why he returned to the Catholic Church.

Douglas Murray reviews Roger Scruton’s posthumous Against the Tide:

The Roger Scruton Legacy Foundation is doing a sterling job in keeping his work alive and discussed. Last year the inaugural Roger Scruton Memorial Lectures took place in Oxford University’s Sheldonian Theatre, with hundreds of students queuing to hear a range of distinguished speakers including Niall Ferguson, Charles Moore, and Jonathan Sumption. And now Mark Dooley, Scruton’s literary executor, has come out with a new volume to help alleviate the ongoing hunger for the philosopher’s work . . . The present volume, Against the Tide, is a concise but rich selection of some of Scruton’s writings for various journals, magazines, and newspapers. Some of the pieces might be familiar to readers of Scruton. Others will not. Still others could not possibly be. The volume includes a number of previously unpublished diary-like entries, of the kind Scruton occasionally contributed to The Spectator in London.

In defense of markets: Matthew Hennessey talks to Brian C. Anderson about his new book, Visible Hand, A Wealth of Notions on the Miracle of the Market.