Kalessin: I see your point. My original, lost post had a bit on the shades of grey involved in determining exactly how "aware" a person is, and who gets to make that evaluation. Certainly, in the case of a child, there is a strong argument that the parents have the right to make this determination. It is a tricky issue, though; certainly not all parents are equally qualified. Clearly it's possible for a parent to make the wrong choices, either on the side of too much or too little censorship. I still think that censorship is only valid when there is a direct causal link between it and harm or harmful actions. The difficult bit is deciding when this causal link exists. Given the choice, I think it would be better for a parent to allow a child to be exposed to an idea, and to provide whatever discussion or instruction is necessary regarding it, than to merely forbid the idea entirely. But then I am not a parent.
There's also a very significant difference between a parent limiting what sorts of TV shows his or her child can watch and a school forbidding a book. One difference is that the school is a public institution. This means first that it should not practice ideological intolerance and second that any repression of ideas undertaken by it is essentially a form of totalitarianism. In the specific instances mentioned at the beginning of the thread, the schools are clearly engaging in the repression of a certain set of ideas and the advancement of a religious cause.
Mhoram:
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The problem obviously arises with having many parents to accomodate, these parents often having different morals and thus having conflicting expectations of what and how the school should teach.
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This is precisely why (well it's one reason at any rate) schools should foster an atmosphere of open-mindedness and toleration. That is, they should refrain from censorship as far as possible.
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If the morals of the majority of parents goes against the morals of a small minority of parents and this disagreement cannot be satisfactorily reconciled, the minority may be forced to take their children out of said school and pursue some other means of teaching, be it a different school or home schooling.
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Considering the current issue in the U.S. of school vouchers and such, this is a topic that makes me a little uneasy. I acknowledge the right of a parent to, at least to some extent, decide to what ideas to expose his or her child. However, taking children out of public schools causes problems. First, there should be no need to do so, since public schools should, as I said above, foster an attitude of open-mindedness (so should parents!). Second, private schools tend to cater to special-interests (most notably, religion), and thus tend to be far less open-minded than public schools. Third, it is not fair to the public school systems (many of which are overcrowded and underfunded) to divert resources to special-interest schools that do not serve everyone.
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The way I see it, schools are tools funded by the tax payers, endowed with certain restrictions and guidelines by the goverment, but then left to be willed by the people that it serves, the local community. This is a largely Christian country and so you will see largely Christian morals, these morals merely find their way into representation in the school system as it naturally bends to the will of the community. It's just representing the morals held by the local majority, not acting on it's own Christian religious beliefs.
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It doesn't matter whether ninety-nine percent of the population is Christian; it's still wrong to use a public institution to force, in any way, Christianity upon the remaining one percent. I don't see any way to justify the suppression of non-Christian ideas (which is, after all, the event that started this thread) in a public school, either morally or constitutionally. It's a blatant violation both of an individual's religious freedom and of the first amendment.
[ December 05, 2002: Message edited by: Aiwendil ]