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Debate Info

30
30
True False
Debate Score:60
Arguments:44
Total Votes:67
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 True (23)
 
 False (21)

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TERMINATOR(6780) pic



Under no condition should a book be banned from public schools.

True

Side Score: 30
VS.

False

Side Score: 30
1 point

If teachers are forbidden to recommend a book, I guess that can be debatable. Teachers must be capable of telling children to make good decisions, and it's possible that reading a certain book can be bad (like those "how to" books).

But a student should be able to read any book he wishes. First Amendment. No reason to limit knowledge (books enhance knowledge).

Side: True

If a student is unable to check out a book at the school's library, what is going to stop him from checking the book out at a local public library? Then what, do we ban those books from public libraries so now that the general public has to suffer just to deter from one student checking out one book.

Side: True
AtlantaEsq(94) Disputed
2 points

This is akin to saying, "Well, I'm 18 and in high school. My school should sell cigarettes out of a vending machine, because I could just buy them at the local store." The issue isn't the individual's possibility of getting access to potentially dangerous information, it's about preventing access to this information. Schools should not be in the business of disseminating destructive or harmful information the same way they shouldn't be in the business of selling cigarettes regardless if the student can't that info elsewhere.

Side: False
TERMINATOR(6780) Disputed
2 points

This is akin to saying, "Well, I'm 18 and in high school. My school should sell cigarettes out of a vending machine, because I could just buy them at the local store."

That is inaccurate. A high school could not legally sell cigarettes via a vending machine because it is illegal to sell cigarettes to minors.

The issue isn't the individual's possibility of getting access to potentially dangerous information, it's about preventing access to this information.

In psychology, we call it 'reactance theory', or 'Forbidden-Fruit effect'. It means that if it is banned, people will want it. Thus, if, say, It by Stephen King were to be banned, that would only cause people to want to read 'It'.

Schools should not be in the business of disseminating destructive or harmful information the same way they shouldn't be in the business of selling cigarettes regardless if the student can't that info elsewhere.

Another inaccuracy:

Tobacco, and thus cigarettes, cause damage to the user's body, and supposedly to those who inhale 'second-hand smoke'.

HOWEVER

Such books as those which are banned DO NOT cause damage.

Chris Ferguson has more on this:

http://www.tamiu.edu/~cferguson/pubs.html

Side: True
1 point

No books should teens should have the right to read other peoples opnion and views.

Side: True
AtlantaEsq(94) Disputed
1 point

Verbs sentence the help subject nouns syntax meaning translation.

Side: False
4 points

How to build a bomb, How to Kill someone without being noticed, How to...

Hell, How To books should just be banned.

Side: False
casper3912(1581) Disputed
0 points

There is nothing wrong with knowing how to make a bomb or transmitting that knowledge. The problem becomes when someone uses that knowledge to harm another, and the more knowledge they have over another the more able they are to harm them. So lets say two people read "how to make a bomb"(lets say one reads it from the internet another from the school library) one plants it in the other's house and the other finds it and diffuses it, where if not reading it he would of at least lost his house. You can make knowledge less abundant, but all that does is make it more valuable to a particular person, making it more abundant makes it valuable to the entire community.

It also allows for exponential growth of knowledge. Perhaps the unique timing device in "how to make a bomb" would make a perfect stove/cooking timer, better then any other designs; stopping the reinvention of the wheel so to speak. Someone could then decide they have a better way of integrating the timer and stove etc. knowledge builds on knowledge, restrict any of it and you restrict all of it.

Side: True
johnnywup(6) Disputed
3 points

Well the book's not on how to dismantle a bomb, its how to build one. Although I agree with the knowledge aspect, the young mind is curious and wants to put his knowledge to the test. Sometimes knowledge of certain things can cause worse things than being sheltered from the topic.

Side: False
2 points

If you had written "library" instead of "school", I might have agreed with you, but a typical public school doesn't have too many adults for students (age 18+) and there are plenty of things that children should not be reading, like a book on sex positions, which could be argued as pornography. I mean, if I teen wants to read it at home, that's one thing, but books like that shouldn't be in schools.

Side: False
TERMINATOR(6780) Disputed
2 points

Just because it oughtn't be in schools does not mean that it should explicitly be banned. No school in the world has every single book - couldn't they just overlook the inappropriate ones?

Side: True
2 points

Yeah, books on how to fuck around with dynamite or make weapons fully automatic should totally be allowed in public school libraries. Because teenagers are not prone to being curious or experimenting with things like drugs or sex or anything remotely risky for that matter. Additionally, teenagers don't go around kiling their classmates with pipe bombs or rifles or anything of the sort. In fact, I think the US government should just declassify everything related to enriching plutonium and put that in public school libraries too. Because afterall, there aren't any science whizzes out there that are picked on and repressed who would make use of that information.

Side: False
1 point

I think that, given how impressionable young children are, that all religious texts should be banned from schools until the child is above the age of consent.

Side: False
TERMINATOR(6780) Disputed
1 point

A great number of children are taught religion at home. What good would it do to ban religious texts from schools? Religion is a fundamental aspect of most peoples' lives - both past and present.

Side: True
Scumbarge(116) Disputed
1 point

Many religious texts are entertaining, or good educational material for references. Greek myths or the Bible, for example, are among the most oft-quoted works around. Understanding literary allusions is important to education.

Just keep them in the fiction section, and there's no problem.

Side: True

What a ridiculous topic. How about a book about why pedophilia, drug use and murder is ok. Those would all be excellent ideas to put into the minds of impressionable children.

Sounds like a book that should be banned from public schools doesn't it...oh wait, that would be a bad thing.

Side: False
TERMINATOR(6780) Disputed
2 points

What makes the topic ridiculous?

Just because you thing the answer is obvious does not mean that it always is.

Side: True
casper3912(1581) Disputed
1 point

Those would all be excellent ideas for a child to disagree with; kids are impressionable but not that way; their parents, society, and culture would all point them against those things. There is a reason why the bible is still popular...

Side: True
TERMINATOR(6780) Disputed
1 point

In the words of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas ("The One Un-American Act." Nieman Reports, vol. 7, no. 1, Jan. 1953, p. 20):

"Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us."

Side: True
1 point

There's such a thing as quality control, you know. Library volumes aren't infinite; some measure of culling has to be in place just to keep the mediocre books from spilling out into the hallways.

Plus, there has to be at least SOME discernment. I'm not talking book burning boards made up of fundamentalist housewives, just...some common sense. For example, I'm as against censorship as the next guy, but I'd be kind of upset if I saw "The Vagina Ass of Lucifer Niggerbastard" (yes, that's a real book) in a school library. So, you know, limits. Sometimes a good thing.

Side: False
casper3912(1581) Disputed
1 point

I looked that up real fast, it seems funny. Why it can't go in a comedy section, if a school library has a comedy section, is beyond me. Yea it has cuss words in it, etc. Why shelter our kids from that? Its not like their using them behind our backs already...[sarcasm]

The school could just say that it doesn't provide any educational benefit, except in rare cases, and thus resources should be spent on other books.

Side: True
1 point

There are books who just teach us to do wrong things. So, sometimes banning a book its not a bad thing.

Side: False
1 point

I have a book that will definitely be banned

Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf

Side: False
TERMINATOR(6780) Disputed
1 point

But why? The book is simply a 'memoir' of sorts. There is nothing intrinsically evil about it.

Side: True
-1 points

All religious material should be banned from public schools. It's not factual material it's all fantasy of a god that never was nor will it ever will be and anything in the religious rim of things should be done in the privet sector there they can poison these little minds on their own terms.

Side: False
TERMINATOR(6780) Disputed
3 points

You have no proof that religious texts are not factual, and I could give you a shitload of links that prove otherwise.

So, before a book can be accepted into a school, it must be factual? That means we can't have any Shakespeare or Dickens or Verne or Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.

Even if religions are all mistaken, that does not mean that their texts include 'words to live by', so to speak. Religious quotations can be found the world over - a popular one included 'Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' So, should every book/article with that quotation be banned?

There is an old text, you most likely have never heard of it, known as 'The Constitution of the United States'. AMENDMENT NUMERO UNO GIVES FREEDOM OF RELIGION.

All public schools should ban religious materials because children's minds are too impressionable? Who says that their minds are impressionable? Give me your SOURCES!!!

Even teenagers oughtn't read religious texts? Are they still impressionable?

Nobody should ever read a science textbook then, either. Science gets changed, old theories revised, new studies conducted, which make the old stuff look like fiction. Read an old science textbook, and compare it with a new one.

Side: True
1 point

More important than freedom of religion is freedom from religion. If children are going to read a book that justifies infanticide, misogyny, murder, incest, rape, slavery, racism and torture, it should happen as a result of poor parenting at home, not a lack of judgment in an institution of learning funded with tax dollars.

Side: False