By order of a Miami-Dade County school board the book “Vamos a Cuba” and its English-language version, “A Visit to Cuba” must be removed from all Miami-Dade County school libraries. Porque? According to one board member who supports the ban, Perla Tabares Hantman:
A book that misleads, confounds or confuses has no part in the education of our students, most especially elementary students, who are most impressionable and vulnerable.
What’s so confusing and misleading about the books? Well it shows Cuban children smiling wearing their school uniforms. Everyone knows Cuban children never smile! But other countries shouldn’t feel bad. The school board voted to get rid of books from the same series about Greece, Mexico and Vietnam (What no China? Oh that’s right the U.S. has billion dollar trade treaties with them). It’s one thing to get rid of books because they are outdated. It’s another thing to ban books because of their “political content”. I thought democracies didn’t ban books. Silly me.
Via / Yahoo News
Stupidest thing I’ve heard all week. Let’s keep our children ignorant of all countries we’re not “friends” with, great strategy.
This has been a hot topic around here. Check out one of the discussions locally at Critical Miami.
THE MIAMI HERALD
July 8, 2006
TAXES FOR VAMOS A CUBA: “SINFUL AND TYRANNICAL”
By Frank Bolanos
Mr. Frank Bolanos is a member of the Miami-Dade School Board
If the Newark, New Jersey school board decided to issue “Little Black Sambo” as a third grade reader, how would that largely African-American community react?
Famed progressive educator Carl L. Marburger posed this question in 1974, when he said controversial schoolbooks in rural West Virginia showed the public school system’s “astonishing insensitivity to local cultural values.”
Those aggrieved local folks endured the insults, catcalls and jeers of the liberal elite until Marburger, a self-described liberal’s liberal, spoke up and gave them pause. Today, the Miami-Dade school board and I are being accused of censorship for our efforts to remove from school libraries “Vamos a Cuba,” a children’s book that paints a false and distorted portrait of life in communist Cuba.
If the teachers’ unions, Herald columnists, the ACLU and Fidel Castro himself are to be believed, the Miami-Dade school board is pillaging school libraries, burning books, oppressing the intellectual freedom of helpless children, and stomping on the First Amendment.
None of this is true; this is not a First Amendment issue. Censorship occurs when government refuses to allow people to purchase material, not when it refuses to provide that material at no charge.
Just as the First Amendment grants basic freedoms to those espousing even the most repugnant of views, I support Alta Schreier’s right to author and publish “Vamos a Cuba.” I defend the right of any Miami bookstore to sell it and I defend the right of any American to read it. Indeed, let the author promote and sell her book and compete in the marketplace of ideas.
But taxpayers must not be forced to subsidize falsehoods, propaganda or insulting imagery. As Thomas Jefferson, wrote, “to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors is sinful and tyrannical.”
Simply put, Jefferson, a framer of the Constitution our critics cite, would see no reason for our schools to spend sparse taxpayer money to promote the circulation of misinformation and lies many in our community equate to oppression and the loss of liberty and life.
If our public schools provided “Little Black Sambo” to African-America children, I would stand with their parents as this would be offensive, racist and an inappropriate use of tax dollars. If our public schools put the grotesquely anti-Semitic children’s book “The Poisonous Mushroom” into libraries, I would stand with Jewish parents to oppose this abhorrent act and misappropriation of public funds. The struggle against Cuban communism is no less important.
In 1995, the Miami Herald was forced to trash an entire section after an offensive cartoon of Martin Luther King, Jr. was mistakenly printed inside. Over the nationally syndicated cartoonist’s objections, editors made the bold decision to pull a half million copies of the magazine.
They did it by hand; it took two full days. It was hard and expensive work to correct a mistake that took only moments to make. Similarly, a foolish decision by an entrenched bureaucracy had to be corrected and has cost our school district valuable time, money and focus.
After the mess, the Herald’s executive editor at the time wrote that the newspaper’s First Amendment obligation is “to present the broadest range of perspectives and opinions in its news and opinion pages. But a newspaper also has an obligation to protect its readers from the outrageously offensive or the egregiously insensitive.”
If such an obligation exists at a privately funded newspaper, certainly Miami’s public officials have a responsibility to assure taxpayers aren’t forced to subsidize racism, anti-Semitism or communism with public dollars.
Likewise, taxpayers shouldn’t have to foot the bill for entrenched and misguided bureaucrats who want to whitewash the horrors of life under Fidel Castro and his brutal regime.
END
As far as I am concerned there is no comparison. No one wants to ban history books from public schools that distort history because it distorts it in favor of those in power. Castro is not a threat to the U.S. and by banning said book , those in Miami are actually feeding into Castro’s regime, especially when he points to the discrepencies in this so called democracy.
What about the possibility of pulling out of Iraq, letting Iran invade and lose resources fighting their own kind,
and then come in and mop up the dregs?
More on this today
Hi, how I can send PM?