The US has just implemented the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, which intends to reduce the amount of lead that children are exposed to. A noble goal.
In reality, the impact and broad reach of this law is insane. Every single piece of anything sold for children needs to be tested, at the seller’s cost. Which means anyone who crafts or sells anything for kids needs to have every single component of every single item tested at hundreds of dollars per test.
The most horrible aspect of this is that lead was only banned from printer’s ink in 1985, which means that it is now a crime with a $100,000 fine to sell a childrens book printed before 1985.
That’s not a hyperbole. That’s not a misstatement of the law. That’s it. Printed before 1985 = no sale.
Well, actually, the law says you can sell it, and you don’t even have to test it. But if it has lead in it, you’re guilty.
As homeschoolers, especially as homeschoolers following the Charlotte Mason philosophy, this is a real blow. Many, if not most of the books we use are very old. I’ve encouraged MrsPages not to get rid of old versions, even when the temptation was there. The temptation was “We can use the shelf space, and they’ll always be at the library.” But that’s no longer true. Libraries, used book sellers and thrift stores all have to follow this law.
As Canadians, it doesn’t affect us directly, but Canadian sellers are pulling kids books because the primary market is American. The primary source is American, so suppliers are drying up.
I’m left trying to figure out what sort of lobby group would have pressed for something like this. Who does this benefit?
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Ultimately, it benefits major corporations who can reprint those books with new covers and everything and sell them for MUCH more than the originals cost when they first came out. Their attitude being that if someone likes the book enough, they’ll buy the new version.
Also, and this is just a personal opinion, I think a lot of older books confront our current way of doing things in very prophetic ways. Some of them even confront corrupt governments and the like. By, in essence, causing these books to be discarded or banned,those in power succeed in, for a time, suppressing the messages contained in those books.
I have no words to express how dumb this is. I’m not usually one who yells about the gov’t interfering too much in our lives, but in this case, leave us alone and trust us to make intelligent decisions. We don’t let kids eat books.
Jeremy, I really struggle with trying not to fall for conspiracy theories and such, but it just makes far too much sense, dunnit?
Really, though, how many ‘facts’ in a text/reference book written in ’85 are relevant today? How many of them have been re/over-written in those 24 years?
It would be a MASSIVE undertaking (and a financial dig, which is, I guess, somewhat out-of-scope here), but you could consider scanning all the “old” texts for archival purposes, then resupplying your on-shelf library.
That would render your on-shelf current, while still leaving the older texts available for look-up in a Virtual library.
Most of the books we’re talking about aren’t textbooks per se, but novels, both historical and simply old. Many of the books are of great value as stories and as historical lessons (we use the stories of people through history as a ‘spine’ to base our schooling on) and are no longer in print. There aren’t modern versions or equivalents to many of them.
We aren’t just teaching school from a 1964 encyclopedia.
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