Pretty much the title sums it up. There’s a lot to be concerned about, and one thing I find personally disconcerting is how US educational systems might be impacted.
Do we need to make backups of, like, everything educational and scientific? And where are all the places and forms that we can host these materials?
Edit: to everyone saying it shouldn’t be an issue because Trump/US doesn’t control information in the rest of the world, keep in mind that is little comfort to those of us here if access to that information becomes restricted as well. We should be seeking to hedge all bets.
The only thing is that there’s not really a vehicle for the fed to implement those bans. For all the weaknesses in the US constitution, freedom of speech is a historically tough nut for the government to crack. Not that they haven’t tried, but they have almost no control over what media is and is not allowed to be published publicly.
What is working is when states get to decide what material to provide in schools. That includes required curriculum and what books they will buy and offer in classrooms and libraries. So the state can teach (or not teach) whatever they want within the confines of their own schools, but there’s nothing they could do if, say, someone was to set up shop on the sidewalk across the street and hand out free copies of Gender Queer to any students who walk by. Nor could the fed, as it stands.
So we’ve led our horses to water, but how do we make them drink? How do you convince the students to want to pick up that book and read it for fun, and how can you help them understand what it all means when the critical reading skills for queer literature are not being taught?
“We’ve led the horse to water” is just “it’s not literally illegal to own?” OK.
I mean what I said. You can preserve content and make it as accessible as you want, and I don’t think there will be much resistance from the government in doing so. But that doesn’t solve the bigger issue of states having the authority to say “We don’t want to teach this content in our school systems.” How do you address that?
Even if the content is free and accessible outside of the classroom, what makes a student want to pick up a book on their own? Fewer US students today read for fun than they used to. And if their classes do not provide the critical reading skills to sufficiently understand the content of a given text, how much can they appreciate it?
One could suggest establishing a national curriculum that could realign these renegade states. But in the current political climate, that would be more likely used to make the problem worse, leading to bans on a national scale.
Private schools are not beholden to government entities when it comes to content they do/do not include in their curriculum. But I can promise the solution is not to privatize school systems en masse, which would be disastrous for a number of reasons.
So instead of focusing on preserving the content that is being taken out of classrooms, which isn’t otherwise going anywhere, why not focus more on meeting students where they are? Ensure that LGBT+ representation continues to exist in other forms of media that they consume. Normalize being queer in all spaces, not just the classroom. Provide support and social services for queer youth. Eventually people will come to realize that these identity politics are a waste of time and leading to worse outcomes in conservative states. Reformed curricula will follow.