“Anyone who cares about freedom of speech and democratic values should be appalled by these exclusionary bills,” said Jonathan Friedman, one of the report’s authors and the group’s director of free expression and education. “Educational gag orders muzzle entire subject areas, scare teachers from engaging in important discussions, and deprive students of opportunities to ask questions, learn, and grow. These intrusive bans have no place in our classrooms and institutions.”
The report’s goal is to sound the alarm on the bills, which if taken together they “amount to a sweeping crusade for content- and viewpoint-based state censorship,” the report says.
The authors said they chose to describe the bills as “educational gag orders” because it captures their actual and intended effect, which is to stop educators from introducing specific subjects, ideas, or arguments in the classroom or during training sessions.
Some of the bills already have cast a “chilling effect” over educators and educational institutions, the report says. One of the reasons for that is because the language used in many of the bills is vague and it would mean that the legislation would be applied “broadly and arbitrarily, threatening to effectively ban a wide swath of literature, curriculum, historical materials.”
PEN America says the adoption of the bills demonstrates “a disregard for academic freedom, liberal education, and the values of free speech.”
The bills, which target discussions of race, gender issues and other “divisive” topics, are likely to disproportionately impact students and educators of color while being “misleadingly framed as protecting free speech and academic inquiry.”
“Ultimately, these bills are a painful demonstration of the yawning chasm between many legislators’ professed commitment to the principle of free speech, and their willingness to use the machinery of government to silence the speech of those with whom they disagree,” the report says.
Source : CNN
