Dangerous and Evil Homeschooling Material - Ebay

Ebay has classified Homeschool Textbooks as “illegal, dangerous, offensive, or potentially infringing” (HT: Tammy Bruce). Apparently the attention seems to center around teaching texts homeschoolers might auction off after they are done with it. But no more… at least not on Ebay.

“They told me that it fell under their heading of ‘illegal, dangerous, offensive, or potentially infringing,’” she said. “What are they thinking? I have a mess of curriculum here that I can’t sell, and needing money from it to buy curriculum for the new school year.”

One blogger noted that public school interests have been opposing homeschooling more and more, as homeschooling has grown substantially in recent years. Recent estimates have put homeschool attendance in the U.S. at more than 2.5 million. And the same comment noted book publishers also dislike having the products re-sold.

A public school teacher defended the policy, saying she cannot get a teacher’s edition from a publisher unless she provides proof of her teaching employment. “It is quite costly for publishers to research and develop curricula and it is copyrighted.”

Copyrighted yes. Costly to produce, sure. But book business is big business. One doesn’t have to look long to see why many schools haven’t upgraded their books recently. The cost is prohibative to buy new books every year. Heck… that was one reason we sold our books at college. Get $10-20 bucks and spend at least twice that. Copyrights prevent reproduction. No problem, but doesn’t prevent the resale of the original item.

Teachers editions are intended for teacher’s use and eBay believes in limiting the resale of those items as we are not equipped to verify if the buyer is a teacher or not.

Sure they might not want to ‘classify’ homeschool teachers as teachers, ie: legal department troubles. Yet the legal department doesn’t seem to concerned about verifying if every software title going out is a copy or already registered to another person. But Tammy Bruce has put it nicely and I will quote her.

This, mind you, is the same site that has no problem selling Charles Manson and Adolf Hitler related material. But you can’t have that freakish homeschooling stuff. Nah, that’s from the devil!

What harm would it be for students to actually have the teaching material? They still have to look it up. It might even help them. Worried about tests? IF they can remember what they saw and how it was done… then what difference does it make if they saw it from the book or the teacher who copies it on the board for them as a demonstration? Remember having the teacher who couldn’t explain it well? Perhaps the text book the teacher had would have made more sense than the teacher. Sell away folks. Perhaps we need to set up a new site. Banned books of ebay!

No tags for this post.