Missouri Legislature Fights Education

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

In its never-ending quest to keep Missouri school children from getting an education, the Missouri Legislature has passed a statute which takes effect August 28th and presents one more hurdle to keep teachers from actually being able to teach.  The law, which is part of a broader bill that was intended to create a sexual assault survivor's bill of rights, has a secondary aim of keeping some books beyond the reach of students.

The bill mandates that schools pull books that have explicit sexual content from their curriculums and library shelves.  It defines explicit sexual material as any depiction of sex acts or genitalia, with exceptions for artistic or scientific significance.  It applies to images found in books or magazines in the school's library as well as to images found on any internet site to which students have been directed.

Providing students with anything outlined as prohibited in the law will be considered a Class A misdemeanor and will will have a maximum penalty of one year in jail and a $2,000 fine.

One lawyer in the St. Louis area who works at a firm representing multiple school districts, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the new legislation does not apply to the written word, but many districts are not taking any chances and have already pulled books that are routinely challenged from their shelves.

Some conservative parent groups are posting information on-line about how to file police reports regarding objectionable books - and those same groups are providing lists of books which they find objectionable.  A conservative Missouri legislator has been quoted in the press as saying that school districts were "grooming students to be sex addicts" by making certain books available.

Last February two students from Wentzville, Missouri, went to court demanding that some withdrawn books be returned to their library shelves.  Included in their list was Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye."  The students, who were represented in court by the ACLU of Missouri, were successful in their challenge.

Right now, as Missouri schools prepare to open for the 2022-2023 school year, confusion reigns in the school libraries.  Some of the confusion will be sorted as the year progresses, but unless there is a drastic change in the make-up of the state legislature, the forces of darkness and ignorance seem likely to prevail over education in Missouri for the immediate future - and the situation will keep becoming more dire.

Fortunately for those young people who are determined to learn, the internet is just a click away on their phones - and so are the world's largest book-lenders and book-sellers.  Being a ruthless censor is no longer an easy task.  Today when you forbid a kid from reading a certain book, he can be halfway though the first chapter before you are done talking!

And that's a good thing!