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Dictionary banned by Riverside County school


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I am left stunned at the sheer stupidity of that school board. Of course they are slightly less stupid than the parent who complained, but when you are talking stupidity on that scale it makes little difference. Both the school board and the parents need to off themselves for the betterment of the gene pool.

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"It's hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we'll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature."

The school board will decide later whether to return the dictionaries to the classrooms. One board member told the Press-Enterprise that there are probably more objectionable terms in the dictionary.

The mental image this conjures is hilarious. A group of middle-aged men gathered around a large book, feverishly turning pages. One stabs the book with a finger and calls gleefully: "Look! I found 'bum-hole'! - and they all snicker before continuing their search.

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I thought one purpose of education was to educate. To deny the existence of such words doesn't make much sense, as sooner or later all kids will discover them, with or without the dictionery. I thought schools were supposed to help students learn about their world, teach them appropriate ways to relate to such things as sexual language or obscenities with a moral approach, teach them about context and behavior and attitudes, teach them that sex is part of life and give them a foundation of fact to deal with it, deal with what they'll be encountering as they continue to grow up and how it all fits together.

We're living is strange times. Things seems to be going backwards.

C

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I thought one purpose of education was to educate. To deny the existence of such words doesn't make much sense, as sooner or later all kids will discover them, with or without the dictionery. I thought schools were supposed to help students learn about their world, teach them appropriate ways to relate to such things as sexual language or obscenities with a moral approach, teach them about context and behavior and attitudes, teach them that sex is part of life and give them a foundation of fact to deal with it, deal with what they'll be encountering as they continue to grow up and how it all fits together.

We're living is strange times. Things seems to be going backwards.

C

There is a theory that it has always been going backwards but with the Internet, we are more aware of it doing so.

I don't think that is true, even if it seems obvious that governments all around the world are doing their utmost to make sure the Net is, or becomes ineffective in distributing anything other than the officially sanctioned cultural values.

The age of reason and the Enlightenment (1650-1800) which broke the spell of doctrine and superstition (the Dark Ages) should have been replaced by inquiry, education and the scientific method and individual freedom. These offered no real threat to personal belief systems unless those beliefs denied the values of the Enlightenment, and denying them is indeed what is happening; mostly from extremist points of view which, would drag us back into a Dark Age of Inquisition, devoid of rationality.

Forsaking human rights, rational inquiry, and compassion is the fastest way to become insane, and that madness is all around us.

Have a nice day!

:icon11::stare:

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I guess they'll have to ban all computers from their schools, too. God knows what would happen if you did a Google search for "oral sex." They think the dictionary is bad...

I think I just read (no joke) that the #1 search for kids 6-10 is "Porn." Swear to god. That gets you 158,000,000 hits -- some that I suspect are not exactly "age appropriate."

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Both Riverside County and San Bernadino County, two counties contiguous to LA County, have some very strange people living in them. There's a Cal State and a UC school there, one in each country, so there are some smart people there, too, but a whole lot of strange ones inhabit both counties.

Seems like some of those strange ones ended up on the Riverside School Board.

C

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I guess they'll have to ban all computers from their schools, too. God knows what would happen if you did a Google search for "oral sex." They think the dictionary is bad...

You don't need to enter "oral sex" -- just enter "oral" and you'll find that the first few hits are for "oral sex" and that means we should write to the Menifee School District and demand that they eliminate the Godless computers that allow little children to discover such perverted information! :icon11:

Colin :stare:

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I think I just read (no joke) that the #1 search for kids 6-10 is "Porn." Swear to god. That gets you 158,000,000 hits -- some that I suspect are not exactly "age appropriate."

If that's supposed to be ages 6-10, I don't believe it. Years 6-10 (ie. end of primary school through to just before their junior year in high school), I can believe, but not kids ages 6-10.

I know my boys are more likely to google for online games and cheats for games than anything else.

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If that's supposed to be ages 6-10, I don't believe it. Years 6-10 (ie. end of primary school through to just before their junior year in high school), I can believe, but not kids ages 6-10.

I've caught 7 and 8 year olds (2nd and 3rd graders) searching for porn on school computers. And based on some of the notes I've intercepted and some of the conversations I've overheard, none of them need a dictionary to define "oral sex".

That's the funny thing - by the time a kid is old enough to use a dictionary to look up "oral sex" (they're overestimating how much children use dictionaries), they've already heard twenty different slang terms for it. Their main reaction is going to be "Oh. I thought that was called..."

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How times change. My parents back in the 1950s were able to keep me seen but not heard, as well as totally ignorant about the truth of the existence of Father Christmas (and sex.)

As I read modern stories I have had to accept my childhood fantasies were a whole lot less wholesome than my parents would have preferred, but I have to admit demolishing their fairy tales afforded me much fun in overcoming the lies I had been told, in order to stop me cumming over everything. They failed and puberty won. Ignorance was shot down by a fast hand (or two.)

To gain some understanding of my childhood incarceration in the land of the stupidly na?ve, I'll take the opportunity for a gratuitous plug for my story Definitions which features what it was like to grow up without the Internet or a dictionary containing *naughty* words. In my story, the search in the public library for the definition of a certain word is based on my own real world experience when I was 13.

The rest of the story is very much a fiction. :icon11:

I wrote Definitions to try to enhance the understanding of the repression, (though somewhat benign in my family) of the era, when compared to the marvellous freedom of information available to today's youth. The Riverside County school board members obviously, never had the ability or opportunity that I luckily had, to break down those repressive indoctrinations. It is sad to think such ignorance still exists.

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Thanks Cole, I have updated my signature panel below so it is easier to find my stories hosted at Codey's World.

AwesomeDude also hosts some more of my stories including my infamous Abducted for a Reason. (See link below.)

:icon11:

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I thought that after the Clinton administration we were past all this since oral sex doesn't really count by presidential decree.

After the school makes a big ruckus about it, kids will go home and google it. Problem solved. :icon11:

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I wondered who would make the Clinton connection. Good work James.

Yes well, we in Australia are awaiting our government's attempt to filter the Internet (in August, I believe.)

I can't wait to see if our forums are off limits.

Make no mistake, governments are not happy with information being so freely available.

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How times change. My parents back in the 1950s were able to keep me seen but not heard, as well as totally ignorant about the truth of the existence of Father Christmas (and sex.)

Ah, there's the difference in generations. I grew up the 1960s, and I knew the basics about sex by the time I was 8 or 9 from the local kids on my block. And I learned a lot more by the time I was 12 (ahem). Because I was a sneaky little sh!t, I figured out Santa Claus by the time I was 9 or 10, but I kept the fantasy going because a) it was fun, and b) I had a sister who was 4 years younger, and I didn't want to spoil things for her.

I absolutely do remember a couple of times when some friends and I had uproarious fun looking up dirty words in the unabridged dictionary. In the 1960s, pre-Internet (and pre-Cable TV), this was about it for having fun.

Howard Stern (who is about a year older than me) has joked about how when he was a kid, a friend of his had an 8mm porno movie that they occasionally watched. He also insists that if he had only had access to modern porno movies on video, he would've been much better at sex (performing and understanding it), and that he envies anybody born in the last 20 years, since they don't have the struggle we did -- learning about it the hard way.

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