Comparing that with a publisher making a decision on what it publishes is apples and oranges.
but you said:
In all of this context, what effectively is the difference between "removed from the curriculum" and "banned"?
what is the difference between "removed from publication" and "banned?" in both cases the ultimate effect is nobody gets to read the book anymore...though the latter seems more final
we have one situation where a book is "banned" and therefore shortly everyone will be reading it, and another where the book has not been "banned" at all but will not be available in the future and will fade from public consciousness
also, if Maus has not been taught nationwide in 7th grade...6th grade...5th grade curriculum, can't it be said that effectively it's already historically been banned in those grades to protect their sheltered little minds which aren't developed enough to deal with those concepts? perhaps not in so many words, but someone at some point made the determination that this is too much for those young minds and we're saving it for a later grade
a current, active decision is certainly politically motivated and there is likely sufficient grounds to oppose it, but I don't want to pretend that there isn't already a gigantic body of works and concepts effectively banned from various curriculums at every grade level
anyway I don't support the active banning of any works of art like maus, in fact children ought to be exposed to more furry nudity at an early age to prepare them for their future
If we want to have a philosophical discussion of the difference between a publishers decision to cease publication and school boards removing pieces of media from curricula by god lets do it.
In order to move forward though we have to at least agree on how we define the word "ban". If we can't at least start there then there is no point in continuing. To my mind, to ban something is an active decision and not a passive one. Things that aren't currently on the curriculum aren't banned, they just haven't been considered for addition. Just as any book that is not published has not be "banned" from publication.
Also, to limit this discussion, the "banning" in question has to be narrowly focused. For example, while the Seuss estate has chosen not to publish specific works in the future, the books themselves are still widely available, similarly while any specific school board can remove a book from the curriculum or even the school itself, the removed books are still widely available outside of the school or classroom. We agree that "ban" in this case does not refer to a society wide censorship of the books in question.
Thirdly, in order to "ban" it has to be the product of an official proceeding in which the item in question is legally prohibited in one way or another.
So, what then given these preconditions is the difference between a publisher ceasing publication and a school-board removing a book from curricula? Namely that the publisher has unilateral control over what content is chooses to spend money on publishing while a school board is ideally a product of the society it's been elected by and the expertise of the administrators hired to oversee the public education of that society.
To keep things short I posit that the Seuss estate choosing to cease publication is, when taken in the context of how a publisher as a business is run, simply a business decision that does not rise to the level of "banning" because the decision was not made in some larger legal context. Just as I cannot "ban" myself from the Bore by simply no longer publishing posts. You could argue that outside pressure lead to the books no longer seeing publication, but there doesn't seem to be much evidence of that outside pressure and in fact seems to have been made entirely internally. You could note that these books are, in a word, not the most popular Seuss books and so stopping publication may have been even more of a business decision than some stated wider goal of improving society. Either way, the announcement of the stoppage precipitated the reaction, rather than some reaction precipitating publication stoppage.
Comparing that specifically to the Maus removal, this was an action precipitated by a third party (not the school board, not a student, not an administrator), and taken against the advice of administrators that had been hired to... well, administrate. The curriculum had been previously approved (active approval, not passive approval) and Maus had been used as part of the curriculum for some time until, upon the outcry from the third party it was determined that Maus needed to be removed. Circumventing a specific and active decision to have Maus taught, in order to control the media that students are exposed to, is a pretty clear cut form of censorship. Whether that censorship means the work has been "banned" is up for discussion I suppose... but at the very least the work has been banned from the specific curriculum in question because a governmental body voted unanimously for it's removal.
Being the dirty centrist I am, I will always argue that the hoopla around "Banned Books Week" and similar media sensations are not about combatting censorship but instead are about injecting progressive values as the default in libraries and schools. In America we don't ever discuss the value of the banned books but are instead focused on the idea that "the right" is attempting to censor academia and so by default all of these discussions are hopelessly mired in social zealotry from one side or the other.
