A school in Eagan, Minnesota has banned newspapers from the school, because they report bad things.
http://www.azcentral.com/offbeat/articles/1020BadNews20-ON.html
So.
Good Mommys & Daddys in the Magical Land Of Suburbia do not show their spawn the newspaper, because if the children do not hear about the evils of the World, then there are no evils in the World.
I weep for my Nation.
Good thing the spawn all get their news on the internet, which mommy and daddy don’t know how to operate.
Next thing you know, the kids will be DANCING! Snd you know where THAT leads!
The signs of a once-great, crumbling empire are everywhere. One of the worst signs is turning our children into pampered pets.
The Christian school I attended had the same ban.* Their objection was not that kids would read about the evils of the world but that newspapers frequently mentioned movie and rock stars as well as having articles on science and other heretical notions. An all around bad thing, newspapers. One is better off if they get their news from The 700 Club.
I believe I was the first kid ever to bring a newspaper to school to read at lunch because they treated it as such incredibly *abnormal *behavior. (I was certainly the last, because the ban came down the next day.) “Why are you reading that, anyway?” My explanations that I liked to know what was going on in the world weren’t seen as reasonable. “A girl your age doesn’t read the PAPER! Really-- why do you have it?”
I started reading the paper at age eight or nine. My mom tells me that one of the first results was that I asked her, “What’s rape?” She still let me read it, though.
Is it too much to hope that they’ll ban Channel One next?
I don’t know, in the defense of the school there is some material in the paper that can get pretty graphic for a seven year old. I think there are better ways to inform children that young of the evils in the world. One of the kids I teach read an article on volcanoes and was freaked for weeks…and we live in Saskatchewan!
Our newspaper group has a reading partnership with some local schools, and I know my youngest brother (a high school freshman) is required to do current events stuff now and then. So here’s hoping this ignorant ridiculousness doesn’t start spreading.
Well sure, but if Blackstrap went up, that would be pretty disgusting (and miraculous).
The same teacher suffered me (well, that’s the way Mom puts it) in Kindergarten 1, 1st grade and 4th grade. By the end of K1, she knew that the best way to keep me out of her hair was to collect a copy from each kind of newspaper any teacher brought and hand them to me. Their rightful owners would get them back when we were on recess and for lunch hour, and finally when classes were over.
So at the not-so-tender age of 5, I was reading 3 newspapers cover to cover daily (only one on weekends), all with varying degrees of “acceptance of the Regime”.
Mom claims she first tried sending me to buy the bread (daily task, in Spain) when I was about that age but had to stop doing so because when people asked for my opinion on politics I would answer, and of course those people would never have believed that it was 100% MY opinion and didn’t necessarily match Dad’s or hers…
Think that might have something to do with my ending up all Dopey?
I am supportive of the mother of the 7 year old as well as the school principal (with some clarification/modification).
First of all, something I say all the time in real life, children are not little adults. They do not process information like you and I (as adults) do. They are not idiots, but information has to be presented to them with some care (if anyone wants me to expand on this, I could- but it would probably be long).
I don’t know if you have noticed, but newspapers and TV news can be somewhat sensationalist :rolleyes: . The way that they present information is not very “kid friendly.” I would much rather be presenting the information to my own kids than have the newspaper do it.
Example. Today there were 4 headlines today on my local paper. #1 “The Horror of What If?” Subhead: "Toxins like those in 1st incident give people minutes to live.” This was about a train wreck that occurred in city limits this week. #2 “Death Awaits Shoppers at Iraq Market” #3 “Brownsville Mourns and Wonders after Family Slain” this was about a mom, dad, and their two children (ages 4 and 3) being murdered in Florida. #4 Was about the elections.
I don’t want my 7 year old reading this stuff intended for adults, especially with me not around. It has been my experience that disasters and the idea of mom and dad getting killed scares the crap out of kids. If there are pictures, especially if the victims look like them, they seem to get even more freaked. Will the headlines scare or cause anxiety in 100% of the kids, 100% of the time? No. Using common sense and the knowledge of their own kid, do parents have a right to be concerned? Yes.
The article did not specify how the papers have been used in the past, but I think that a good compromise would be rather than handing out the free newspapers to the kids to thumb through (if that is what they did), maybe the teacher could pick out appropriate articles with things that may be easier for the kiddos to digest. Example, In today’s hometown paper, they had articles on space exploration, politics, a big piano competition controversy, and a story about the impact a new factory is going to have on our town. I think most elementary kids would be able to handle these topics if presented correctly.
Dear Santa,
I will trade all the Christmas presents I am due forever in return for the ability to bitch slap any person I may meet or hear reliable report of. Not kill, not mame, just slap. Once. Really, really hard. So as to make an opening for the Sense to answer.
Thank you,
Pullet
Meh. When I was young the teachers used to try to make us read the paper but we found it boring and it was too hard looking up most of the big words anyway.
I miss college.
I agree with Mesquite-Oh. Schools are not home, teachers are not parents, children are not tiny adults, and newspapers are not written for kids (well, except the ones written for kids, of course.)
I think teachers should be free to use selected articles to teach bias in the media, current events and journalism or anything else where it would be useful, but I don’t think whole newspapers should be lying around for elementary age perusal. (After about 12 or 13 years old, I think it’s generally OK.)
Think of the horrid newstories linked to in The Pit on a regular basis - children being tortured and neglected by their parents, obese peoples flesh growing into furniture fabric, a retarded man being attacked and anally raped with pumbing snake - often events are described in horrific detail. We, a group of intelligent, world-wise, articulate and capable adults, often find the news horrifying and disturbing - why would it be appropriate for an unsupervised 7 year old to read about rape via plumbing snake? Newspapers, today, would be at least PG-13 if rated like films. If a school requires parental permission to show a PG-13 or R movie to my kid (as most school do nowadays), then they should also get my permission (or not) to let the kid read material which requires adult guidance.
I let my kid read the paper at home, where I can discuss articles with him, answer any question, clear up any misunderstandings, and together we can research any bias and find out “the rest of the story.” I don’t expect or anticipate that a teacher can do the same with 30 students reading 30 different articles at their own leisure. Part of a lesson, using selected articles that the teacher can provide guidance about? Great, no problem. Free reading? Nope.
Schools are acting in the parent’s place (there’s some fancy Latin term I can’t recall.). If I was unable to adequately supervise my son’s reading because I was too busy with other things, I would tell him he should wait for me and not just go ahead on his own. This is not censorship, it’s the school acting responsible when they know they are unable or unwilling to provide adequate supervision for an activity that warrants it.
There might also be an issue of kids reading them in class. As a former teaching assistant, I remember just how annoying it was when students read the paper in class.
One of the reading books I had in elementary school had a piece about a volcano suddenly erupting from a farmer’s field in Mexico (Paricutin). For a while after that, I thought that a small bump in the ground in our back yard was going to turn into a volcano. I lived in Maryland, which I’m pretty sure has been volcano-free for a very long time, but of course I didn’t know that then, so I was scared.
Amazingly, children get scared of things. I don’t regard this as a suitable reason for preventing them from reading the newspaper, however.
When I was a kid, we had the Oka Crisis here in Canada. Being eight, I was convinced that a huge war was going to break out, and since I’d heard that one of the reserves involved (Akwesasne) straddled the Canada-US border, I was sure that Canada and the US were going to go to war, etc., etc.
How did my parents react? They told me, yes, it’s a serious situation, and the army is involved, but no, there’s not going to be a big war, especially not between Canada and the US. We went to a protest in front of the Manitoba Legislature to support the Mohawks (my first protest!). And events prospered to their conclusion with no further impact upon my psyche.
Preventing me from reading (or in my case, listening) to the news without a parent present was not, I believe, considered as an option. This is because my parents were sensible.
Preventing kids from reading newspapers isn’t going to keep them from getting scared, either. Some kids find things in their reading or history books or the novels they read for class disturbing (like me with the volcano story).
I don’t think you could have much of a class on literature, even for kids, if you excluded all books and stories that dealt with themes like divorce, parents abandoning children, pets or relatives dying, war, people being injured, or anything else that someone might find disturbing (even leaving out left-field stuff like my volcano fear). If you did have a literature class like that, it would probably just manage to convince even more kids that reading is boring. You certainly couldn’t get kids interested in using their school library if it excluded any material that someone might find disturbing- one kid’s disturbing is another kid’s interesting.
Maybe they’re afraid kids will learn too much too soon.
In my first and only day at nursery school, I brought a book along. The teacher took it away from me, since I was obviously too young to know what a book was for and couldn’t possibly read. I protested, and when my mother came to pick me up, the teacher described the incident. Mom said, “Of course he can read. I taught him myself.”
I was kicked upstairs to kindergarten, where reading was more accepted, and nothing has been the same since.
You bitch-slapped the dumb right out of the gal, Pullet!
You knocked idiocy right out of Big Al, Pullet!
as opposed to plumb loco parentis - those parents are straight up crazy 
Si