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Tennessee school board bans Pulitzer prize-winning Holocaust novel, Maus

A Tennessee school board has banned a Pulitzer prize-winning novel from its classrooms over eight curse words and an illustration of a naked cartoon mouse.

The graphic novel, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by New Yorker Art Spiegelman, uses hand-drawn illustrations of mice and cats to depict how the author’s parents survived Auschwitz during the Holocaust. […]

Ten board members unanimously agreed in favour of removing the novel from the eighth-grade curriculum, citing its use of the phrase “God Damn” and drawings of “naked pictures” of women, according to minutes taken from a board of education meeting earlier this month.

“There is some rough, objectionable language in this book,” director of school, Lee Parkison, is recorded as saying in opening the session’s opening remarks. […]

Board member Tony Allman supported the move to remove the “vulgar and inappropriate” content, arguing: “We don’t need to enable or somewhat promote this stuff.”

“I am not denying it was horrible, brutal, and cruel,” Allman said in reference to the genocide and murder of six million European Jews during the second world war.

“It shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids, why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff? It is not wise or healthy,” he added. […]

Mike Cochran, another school board member, described parts of the book as “completely unnecessary”.

“We are talking about teaching ethics to our kids, and it starts out with the dad and the son talking about when the dad lost his virginity. It wasn’t explicit but it was in there,” Cochran said.

“We don’t need this stuff to teach kids history. We can teach them history and we can teach them graphic history. We can tell them exactly what happened, but we don’t need all the nakedness and all the other stuff.”

Cochran proposed revisiting the entire curriculum over concerns it was developed to “normalise sexuality, normalise nudity and normalise vulgar language.”

“If I was trying to indoctrinate somebody’s kids, this is how I would do it,” he added. “You put this stuff just enough on the edges, so the parents don’t catch it but the kids, they soak it in. I think we need to relook at the entire curriculum.”

Most of the articles/Twitter responses to this focus solely on the removal of Maus from the curriculum for spurious reasons (which is bad enough on its own!). I would like to suggest that the real story here is that at least two board members specifically said, out loud, that the reason the book needs to be banned is because its Jewish author is using it as part of a deliberate and secret plot to indoctrinate children into sexual perversion

Cochran is right, if I were trying to get someone to think that something was cool and sexy, I’d associate as closely with graphic, emotionally raw depictions of the fucking holocaust as I could.

That’s why most sugary cereals have pictures of Auschwitz on the front.

“It shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids, why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff? It is not wise or healthy,” he added. […]

just a guess here but I don’t think the book by a Jewish author is pro-Holocaust. tumblr depiction equals endorsement brain over here

“We don’t need this stuff to teach kids history. We can teach them history and we can teach them graphic history. We can tell them exactly what happened, but we don’t need all the nakedness and all the other stuff.”

man this really is peak Puritan isn’t it. shocking: nudity. not shocking: the fucking Holocaust

maybe Texas Tennessee really really needs to normalise nudity and sexuality

Having seen discourse about this on twitter, this Guardian article makes this feel like a non-troversy. They took a book off the 8th grade syllabus, presumably to replace it with another book. This happens all the time. The book was not banned banned.

I mean I am not saying Maus is covert furry propaganda, or that it should be taken off every syllabus everywhere, but ultimately you could make a case to take this book off a reading list and put another one there.

I can’t say that this particular decision was reasonable, even though a reasonable person could have that same decision - the reasons given are unreasonable. We even can’t talk about whether this was a good or maybe just net negative but not disastrously bad change, because the people who made this decision have brain worms and twitter collectively uses the word “ban“ to talk about this because it only uses 3 characters of the 280-character limit.

You could easily make the case that the book is too graphic for 8th grade (sorry, no pun intended, really unfortunate actually).

But maybe I am missing something, and this decision was actually about banning the book, or striking it from a long list of allowed books, not a short list of mandatory books.

In any case, they should replace it with Will Eisner’s A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories. I predict this would make nobody happy, but it would make the people who deserve it sad.

I dunno how it works abroad, but in the US at least, Middle and High School English teachers are generally expected to decide for themselves which books they want to teach. And generally they are allowed to. It is not the norm for school boards the decide which books teachers are supposed to teach.“ School board bans teacher from teaching a book” is not a normal occurrence in the US.

Interesting. In my country, there are a handful of books you have to have read, and plays you need to either read or see performed live, by a certain age. This means that one A tier book is more or less mandatory each grade, two more B tier books are strongly suggested (but if there is only time for one it’s ok), and the rest is up to the teacher. Taking a book off the “suggested” C tier is not a big deal. Only the A tier is culturally significant. Also there are S tier books you need to have read for final exams.

I assumed Americans say The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible are A tier, Catcher In The Rye is B tier, and Hamlet is S tier (Macbeth is a cooler story though). That’s how I would rank them. I assumed taking a graphic novel off the English syllabus is not that big a deal.

I stand corrected.

I have not read or seen The Crucible, and I’m not sure I’d even recognize a plot summary of The Scarlet Letter if I saw it. My first instinct is that it’s a Poe story but on second thought that seems wrong and I can’t think of who else it might be.

I read Macbeth in 10th grade and Hamlet in 8th, Catcher In The Rye in probably-8th. (Actually I’d read most of Macbeth, Hamlet, and a half-dozen other Shakespeare plays, on my own time in like 4th grade.) We definitely don’t have anything like that tier system; reading a Shakespeare tragedy is pretty close to A-tier importance but it’s not universal, and which tragedy it is is pretty random. (Might be Romeo and Juliet instead, or even Julius Caesar, unlikely to be King Lear but I wouldn’t be shocked.) In terms of other books that I’d say are considered ‘A-tier’, probably Tom Sawyer and/or Huckleberry Finn, neither of which my school taught at all. I also read To Kill a Mockingbird, and that’s a ‘classic’, but even reading that is probably regional.

There isn’t an official culture of the United States, or anyone with the authority to declare what one would be if they wanted to. The only uniform standards in the national school curriculum comes from Texas having a state board that commissions and approves textbooks. (California has been moving in that direction because Texas-approved history textbooks, and also some biology, have glaring biases and they want to counterbalance it. Textbook writers usually just publish the one version so everyone ends up using Texas-approved books even if they don’t like the biases.) There’s some standards imposed by standardized testing, but they’re heavily contested, and so the only ones with any teeth are for math and an ‘English’ test that is testing only reading comprehension and ability to string together coherent sentences. Even the ‘write a five-paragraph essay’ aspect of standardized testing is contentious, though most places do have that and count the score as a real part of your test grade. (Some places have standardized history/social studies tests, but none has ever been tracked properly because no one can agree on what those tests should be testing. Names and dates? The five-determinisms model of history? Founding principles and philosophies of the country? None of the above?)

In the rest of the country, the highest authority on curriculum is the town School Committee, who are the equivalent of Board of Directors with the school Superintendent as the equivalent of CEO; in smaller towns and rural areas this might be a county-level committee or some other group of a couple towns, maybe as many as a half-dozen if they’re really small. These do not have the time or attention to micromanage the individual curriculum of individual teachers in the school district; the fact that they learned Maus was being taught at all probably involved a parent of one of the kids in that class getting offended and complaining to their School Committee rep (or being the rep themselves - the kind of pearl-clutcher that gets offended by Maus is generally overrepresented on the School Committee).

America has always been a big Shakespeare country, it was noted that frontier settlers would often own only two books – a bible and a Shakespeare collection. When American schools trace a preamerican tradition of English literature it usually starts with Beowulf and passes through maybe Chaucer to Shakespeare

The last real national reevaluation of literature instruction was immediately post-WWII, with the (long-awaited!) scholarly assembly of an American canon, and the philosophy of “New Criticism”, which focused on “close reading” and analysis of structure and perspective. Honestly a lot of this was related to the expansion of colleges from producing a narrow and insular ruling class to a broader American Century professional class, an easily expandable idiom for giving the verbal types a little polish before sending off; some of it filtered down to high school pedagogy though which kind of explains the odd timeframes of high school curriculum – dwelling at length in 19th century romances and poetry, treating the then-recent The Great Gatsby and Ernest Hemingway as particularly significant before abruptly ending, maybe one recent book featuring whichever local brand of 80s and 90s identity activists were demanding representation.