It's the Information Age, and never has so much information been available to so many people. That's not a bad thing.
Not everyone agrees, however.
This is silly, of course. What your average second-grader, even in Florida, needs to know about Cuba isn't a lot. It may be possible to fill the tykes' heads full of all sorts of stuff about Cuba and elsewhere, not the least our own country. That's not really why the schools exist, however. Running schools as political indoctrination camps is wrong, and it makes no difference whether the orthodoxy preached steers left or right.
The Miami book ban clearly violates the First Amendment. A 1982 Supreme Court opinion in a New York case (Board of Education, Island Trees School District v. Pico) drew a bright line separating school boards' rightful ability to decide what to teach and unconstitutional censorship. Public schools may not ban or remove books simply on the basis of disapproval of the ideas they present. The decision to ban “Vamos a Cuba” and its English version, “A Visit to Cuba” - along with the entire companion series about various countries - was based entirely on the desire to see a more anti-Castro portrayal of life in Cuba drilled into the youngsters' heads. A school board might be entitled to add books expanding the range of ideas presented on, say, Cuba, but eliminating books because they aren't politically correct is simple censorship.
While the book in question may be of little interest in much of the country, there's an underlying issue here that is universal. It involves the notion that there's one true version of reality, and anything else ought to be suppressed. This notion promises to be one of the greater challenges we all face here in the Information Age. The more information we have and the easier it is to get, the harder many people fight to suppress that which they disagree.
Some of this starts very close to home - with the person in the mirror. With the proliferation and fragmentation of news outlets in print, online and broadcast, many people are developing a strong tendency to tune in only to those outlets - sometimes just one - that best conforms to their world view, tuning out other sources of conflicting ideas. From there, it's just a short leap of logic to argue that others shouldn't be exposed to objectionable ideas, either.
All this would be bad enough if truth and facts were immutable and easy to determine. Alas, they are not. Generally, it's only through competition with other “facts” and ideas that the truth emerges.
What the little kids in Miami schools need is what all of us need - not the politically correct text to guide us but a healthy curiosity and skepticism, critical thinking skills and the freedom to decide what makes sense and what doesn't.
Our nation's founding generation had no way of knowing Americans would one day have access to such a wide range of information as we do today, but they certainly knew something about human nature. That's why we have the First Amendment. The freedoms of religion, press and speech are essential to liberty, and they're well worth defending.
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