Book Burnings in Utah

I stumbled across this story and had to use it for my post this week.

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705370864/Piles-of-books-burned-in-FLDS-border-town-would-be-president-cited-in-separate-incident.html

To quickly sum up the story, there was a bonfire outside the building which is intended to be used as a new library, with fragments of burned books. Apparently the town has not had a library in years, since the old one had supposedly been ordered closed by the Fundamentalist LDS church president and the books disappeared. The townspeople had started a book drive and had gotten a very generous donation from Barnes and Noble. At the time of this article, it looked as though all that work was wasted.

My first reaction was shock. Here’s a community that is trying to improve itself and provide better for its citizens and someone burns the books? I felt so terrible for the man who owns the building who couldn’t even check to see if there was anything left. The windows had been covered and his key no longer worked.

Then I became very confused and a bit angry when I followed the story to this article: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705371046/Boxes-of-books-feared-burned-in-FLDS-town-recovered-in-Cedar-City.html

Many of the books believed destroyed were found being stored in a nearby town.

Some members of this community were so fearful of outside influences that they were willing to destroy what others had worked so hard for. That’s what made me angry. I wonder if any of the people involved in the burning/hiding were also involved in the efforts to collect the books?

Perhaps even more important... how can these people persuaded that that books are not an evil and that having a town library will only be beneficial?

What is Scholastic Selling?

The story behind this topic has been running rampant on Pubyac lately:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/12/education/12coal.html

Basically, Scholastic teamed up with the American Coal Foundation to produce and distribute a curriculum for 4th graders on the coal industry. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be part of a series or if it's a stand alone product. The criticism is that it presents a biased view of the coal industry as it does not mention any of the negatives. It has been called inaccurate. After the backlash, it appears that Scholastic has pulled back from the curriculum.

At first I was thought it was highly irresponsible of Scholastic to be involved in this if it truly is inaccurate and biased. Then someone chimed into the Pubyac discussion and pointed out that the criticisms to the curriculum were also criticizing her town's way of life and called the calls to pull it censorship.

I haven't seen the curriculum. I know next to nothing about coal mining. I don't know if the curriculum is presenting false information or simply not presenting a full picture. If it is presenting truly false information, then Scholastic should consider their integrity and reputation and pull the publication. If this is the case, then schools should not purchase the curriculum. And the outcry would be justified.

However, if the presentation is merely biased toward the coal industry and the information presented is accurate, it gets trickier. Certainly other biased information gets presented in schools. If we were to take out everything that only presents one side of an argument, other education materials would be eliminated. It becomes the school's responsibility to provide materials to present other viewpoints, if it chooses to spend limited resources on this curriculum.

I'm sure this isn't a popular stance, but as librarians we are supposed to provide access to information regardles of bias, right?