P.S. Choosing public school curricula is not anything like "book banning". It's a totally different thing! It's going to continue, always, as one cannot require school children read every book ever published in school.

 We used to have real effective book banning in this country. We went in the opposite direction and now people can basically get any book they want from the internet:

The History (and Present) of Banning Books in America; On the Ongoing Fight Against the Censorship of Ideas

by Amy Brady @ LitHub.com, Sept. 22, 2016

[....] A decade after the war, a carping moralist government official named Anthony Comstock convinced the United States Congress to pass a law prohibiting the mailing of “pornographic” materials. His definition of the term was murky at best. Anatomy textbooks, doctors’ pamphlets about reproduction, anything by Oscar Wilde, and even The Canterbury Tales were deemed too sexy to send through the mail.

These bans, or “comstockery,” as the practice became known, continued into the new century. But by the 1920s, shifts in politics and social mores led booksellers to see themselves as advocates for people’s right to read whatever they wanted. Then, in 1933, an influential court case—The United States v. One Book Called Ulysses—helped usher in a new era of legal interpretation of the First Amendment.

In that court case, Judge John M. Woolsey overturned a federal ban of James Joyce’s Ulysses—the ban had been in effect since 1922, and court transcripts reveal that the judge who banned the book also remarked that it was “the work of a disordered mind.” Woolsey, who admitted to not liking the novel, found legal cause to challenge the previous judge’s definition of pornography—and by extension, his definition of art. He ultimately ruled that the depiction of sex, even if unpleasant, should be allowed in serious literature. His final edict is at once hilarious and evident of a mind capable of separating legal philosophy from personal preference: “[W]hilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac.”

The case set an important precedent. However, Comstock Law remained on the books until 1957, when the Supreme Court tried Roth vs. The United States. The plaintiff was Samuel Roth, a writer and bookseller convicted for mailing pornographic magazines to subscribers. His trial forced the American legal system to once again reconsider its definition of obscenity. The Court’s final decision was bad for Roth: his conviction was upheld, and he remained in prison until 1961. But it was great for lovers of books: the definition was narrowed to apply to only that which is “utterly without redeeming social importance.” That narrowing made room for books depicting sex and violence. Even Judge Woolsey had found Ulysses to have social importance.[....]

If people don't like public school curricula, they are still FREE in Texas to send their children to any private school that fills the basic requirements: liberal, Christian conservative, inbetween, etc.

And children will continue to seek out any books or movies that their parents don't want them to see, as they usually do. And now they have the internet, which is very hard to police.

And I don't foresee Texas stopping Texans from buying any book on the internet they damn want. (Amazon will see to that.) Today the line is basically drawn federally at child pornography and that is still prosecuted. It's even hard for them to prosecute publication of state secrets, see: Julian Assange.

I wasn't even going there, I was just pointing out that it's not "the first step to authoritarianism" for state lawmakers to get involved with choosing school curricula, that's an absurd argument, it's actually quite the opposite, it's democratic! And if the voters of the state don't like what they chose, they vote them out.

And they are not "banning books" as the children can still read whatever they want when they get home and their parents can read whatever they want all day.

An example of a "first step" to authoritarianism would be for the federal government to make all children of every state and locality to read exactly the same books nationwide in school, so that the next generation of children are all exactly alike in their training and more primed to be accepting of the totalitarian principles of the central government's plan. Still it would not be "totalitarian", as in "totally" if they allowed reading of other books by adults.

Furthermore, in a democracy, f you don't like what the public schools are teaching your community's children, you are supposed to go to the school board meetings and agitate for a change or run for the school board yourself. WHICH IS EXACTLY WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THIS COUNTRY! So we are a long ways from totalitarianism, we are actually going in the opposite direction as to public schools right now, more towards democratic chaos.

And that is merely about what is taught in the free public schools, as it is still very much allowed to send your child to a charter school with different principles (and principals!) from the public schools and to private school, whether it be Christian Conservative or radical lefty Montessori "free to study whatever the child has interest in" or Roman Catholic parochial or breakaway Mormon or Hasidic sect.

Again, this is why we are not totalitarian. It is the essence of diversity! We allow Hasids and Muslims (and Texans) to teach their own children what they want, we don't, like China, send the Uighurs to re-education camps to become more Chinese and try to throttle the internet so that all Chinese are reading the exact same thing.

and here are some related stats

to point, same thing in Ontario, Canada: