A handful of years ago, my local library in our town of 7,000 had a display. It was, What Are Your Pronouns?, and it was in the children's section. That was when it became clear to me how far things had gone.
A library should be a simple, open door: you walk in, you pick up a book, and you decide what to think. Centering "communities," hands the keys to a committee. As soon as a group is allowed to curate for "the community," they gain the power to censor.
This is the death of individual inquiry. When a committee decides which viewpoints are "diverse" enough to include, they are no longer librarians—they are gatekeepers of a social experiment. By prioritizing the group over the person, they turn a sanctuary for free thought into a factory for indoctrination. True freedom of thought requires a library to serve the individual's right to know, not a committee's right to steer. people should be respecting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but it seems more and more we're seeing a backtracking, weakening, reversal, and abrogation...
The reality is that libraries constantly exercise a form of censorship in their job of deciding which books to put on the shelf and which books not to put on the shelf, which books to remove from the shelf and which to keep.
It’s for this reason that librarians must be trained to resist the temptation to push personal political biases.
Librarians used to do a better job of this, but sadly their ranks are infected with political activists these days, thanks to woke university library science programs and the socialist-dominated ALA teaching them to bring leftist activism into their work.
Libraries were strictly administrative before the 1850s, they transitioned into active tools for "assimilation and behavior modification." This function violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees the right to seek information without being tampered with or subjected to gatekeeping.
Beginning in the 1960s, activists influenced by the Frankfurt School—the source of Critical Theory and Marxism—explicitly worked to destroy the concept of library neutrality. They replaced it with "Social Responsibility," an ideology that abrogates the individual’s right to know by turning the library into a machine for social engineering. These Marxist-influenced curators discarded the objective Dewey-focused mandate to instead function as political agents who filter information to suit a specific social agenda.
as I said, librarians don't need to know much unless they're trying to Social engineer and go against a population's right to know and right to have information that is not tampered with...to suit a specific marxist agenda
the American Library Association (ALA)—has faced intense criticism for moving far beyond administrative duties and into the realm of Marxist-influenced social engineering. the ALA elected Emily Drabinski as its president. Drabinski, an associate professor of library studies, ran on an openly socialist platform and famously described herself in a social media post as a "Marxist lesbian." The ideological engine within the ALA is the Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT), founded in 1969. The SRRT was established by activists explicitly influenced by the New Left and the Frankfurt School Their stated goal was to pivot the profession away from "neutrality" (which they viewed as a tool of oppression)
Nothing like Marxists With their totalitarian beliefs to lecture us on oppression... I can almost guarantee the only book they don't have out front and center is Gulag Archipelago...
these actors inside the organization pay lip service to the "neutral clerk" model while ensuring the mechanism for social engineering remains intact. This mimicry is a tactical subversion: they prevent a genuine return to administrative objectivity, effectively using the rhetoric of freedom to protect their ideological gatekeeping. This "universalist" mask allows them to continue the work of the Frankfurt School under the guise of 'protecting the library from polarization', ensuring that the power to curate and shape the population's worldview is never actually surrendered.
get them out of the **** libraries! go back to the Dewey system. That's how to stay objective, neutral and free!
For clarity....The Association of Library Professionals (ALP) rejects social engineering returning to a strictly administrative and neutral framework. Unlike the ALA, which now promotes "Critical Librarianship" and more marxist curation...
Sorry but while this sounds very nice generally it is very vague. The reader can’t tell where this organization stands on the controversial issues.
Do you support librarians hanging political flags in the library representing their personal views? How about when they decline patrons’ requests to hang flags representing other political views than their own?
Do you support maintaining standards of age-appropriateness, and removing books from shelves (or not putting them there in the first place) that are not, for example, a book on a middle school library shelf that describes how to use sex apps for anonymous hookups?
Do you support the idea of librarians responding to patron complaints about certain books and deciding whether or not to keep them on the shelves?
Do you support the idea that the standards of decency of the community that the library serves, that funds the library, should be the guide for the standards of decency of the library?
For example, should librarians have the right to host adult entertainers to read stories to little children, even if the community doesn’t like it? How about when librarians choose to allow disruptive patrons to stay in the library because they feel empathy for them? Is that “viewpoint diversity”?
A handful of years ago, my local library in our town of 7,000 had a display. It was, What Are Your Pronouns?, and it was in the children's section. That was when it became clear to me how far things had gone.
A library should be a simple, open door: you walk in, you pick up a book, and you decide what to think. Centering "communities," hands the keys to a committee. As soon as a group is allowed to curate for "the community," they gain the power to censor.
This is the death of individual inquiry. When a committee decides which viewpoints are "diverse" enough to include, they are no longer librarians—they are gatekeepers of a social experiment. By prioritizing the group over the person, they turn a sanctuary for free thought into a factory for indoctrination. True freedom of thought requires a library to serve the individual's right to know, not a committee's right to steer. people should be respecting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, but it seems more and more we're seeing a backtracking, weakening, reversal, and abrogation...
The reality is that libraries constantly exercise a form of censorship in their job of deciding which books to put on the shelf and which books not to put on the shelf, which books to remove from the shelf and which to keep.
It’s for this reason that librarians must be trained to resist the temptation to push personal political biases.
Librarians used to do a better job of this, but sadly their ranks are infected with political activists these days, thanks to woke university library science programs and the socialist-dominated ALA teaching them to bring leftist activism into their work.
Libraries were strictly administrative before the 1850s, they transitioned into active tools for "assimilation and behavior modification." This function violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees the right to seek information without being tampered with or subjected to gatekeeping.
Beginning in the 1960s, activists influenced by the Frankfurt School—the source of Critical Theory and Marxism—explicitly worked to destroy the concept of library neutrality. They replaced it with "Social Responsibility," an ideology that abrogates the individual’s right to know by turning the library into a machine for social engineering. These Marxist-influenced curators discarded the objective Dewey-focused mandate to instead function as political agents who filter information to suit a specific social agenda.
as I said, librarians don't need to know much unless they're trying to Social engineer and go against a population's right to know and right to have information that is not tampered with...to suit a specific marxist agenda
the American Library Association (ALA)—has faced intense criticism for moving far beyond administrative duties and into the realm of Marxist-influenced social engineering. the ALA elected Emily Drabinski as its president. Drabinski, an associate professor of library studies, ran on an openly socialist platform and famously described herself in a social media post as a "Marxist lesbian." The ideological engine within the ALA is the Social Responsibilities Round Table (SRRT), founded in 1969. The SRRT was established by activists explicitly influenced by the New Left and the Frankfurt School Their stated goal was to pivot the profession away from "neutrality" (which they viewed as a tool of oppression)
Nothing like Marxists With their totalitarian beliefs to lecture us on oppression... I can almost guarantee the only book they don't have out front and center is Gulag Archipelago...
these actors inside the organization pay lip service to the "neutral clerk" model while ensuring the mechanism for social engineering remains intact. This mimicry is a tactical subversion: they prevent a genuine return to administrative objectivity, effectively using the rhetoric of freedom to protect their ideological gatekeeping. This "universalist" mask allows them to continue the work of the Frankfurt School under the guise of 'protecting the library from polarization', ensuring that the power to curate and shape the population's worldview is never actually surrendered.
get them out of the **** libraries! go back to the Dewey system. That's how to stay objective, neutral and free!
For clarity....The Association of Library Professionals (ALP) rejects social engineering returning to a strictly administrative and neutral framework. Unlike the ALA, which now promotes "Critical Librarianship" and more marxist curation...
Sorry but while this sounds very nice generally it is very vague. The reader can’t tell where this organization stands on the controversial issues.
Do you support librarians hanging political flags in the library representing their personal views? How about when they decline patrons’ requests to hang flags representing other political views than their own?
Do you support maintaining standards of age-appropriateness, and removing books from shelves (or not putting them there in the first place) that are not, for example, a book on a middle school library shelf that describes how to use sex apps for anonymous hookups?
Do you support the idea of librarians responding to patron complaints about certain books and deciding whether or not to keep them on the shelves?
Do you support the idea that the standards of decency of the community that the library serves, that funds the library, should be the guide for the standards of decency of the library?
For example, should librarians have the right to host adult entertainers to read stories to little children, even if the community doesn’t like it? How about when librarians choose to allow disruptive patrons to stay in the library because they feel empathy for them? Is that “viewpoint diversity”?