Join EveryLibrary's Executive Director John Chrastka for a "Fight for the First" Panel with Nadine Kalin and Rebekah Modrak, editors of Trouble in Censorville, featuring freedom-to-read advocates Willie Carver, Gavin Downing, and Julie Miller.
A Teacher’s-Eye View of The Radical Right’s Crusade to Take Down Public Education
Across the country, right-wing moral panic (or ideological opposition to diversity and changing social mores masquerading as moral panic) has resulted in book bans and, in Republican-controlled statehouses, the passing of an unprecedented number of laws that invoke the “divisive concept” premise to legitimate discrimination. Since 2020, legislation spearheaded by conservative politicians have affected over one million educators and over 22 million students throughout the States. From Florida, whose “Don’t Say Gay” law prohibits K-12 instruction on gender identity and sexual orientation, to Texas, which is shuttering libraries in schools, America is in the middle of a far-right war on public education.
For the first time, K-12 educators who have been threatened, ostracized, smeared as “pedophiles” and “Marxists,” placed on leave, and fired for teaching the historical truth of the struggle for racial justice, or for offering books by and about LGBTQ+ people are telling their harrowing, powerfully personal stories. In the book Trouble in Censorville: The Far Right’s Assault on Public Education – and the Teachers Who are Fighting Back, 14 public school teachers bring readers face-to-face with first-hand accounts of what it means to be living and working under these realities. In the video testimonies on Censorville.com, 13 educators tell earlier, less-detailed versions of these stories.
Watch on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/1229890725031977
Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMLY6YpBHSY
