\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTennessee 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\u2019s Tale by New Yorker Art Spiegelman, uses hand-drawn illustrations of mice and cats to depict how the author\u2019s parents survived Auschwitz during the Holocaust. [\u2026]
Ten board members unanimously agreed in favour of removing the novel from the eighth-grade curriculum, citing its use of the phrase \u201cGod Damn\u201d and drawings of \u201cnaked pictures\u201d of women, according to\u00a0minutes\u00a0taken from a board of education meeting earlier this month.
\u201cThere is some rough, objectionable language in this book,\u201d director of school, Lee Parkison, is recorded as saying in opening the session\u2019s opening remarks. [\u2026]
Board member Tony Allman supported the move to remove the \u201cvulgar and inappropriate\u201d content, arguing: \u201cWe don\u2019t need to enable or somewhat promote this stuff.\u201d
\u201cI am not denying it was horrible, brutal, and cruel,\u201d Allman said in reference to the genocide and murder of six million European Jews during the second world war.
\u201cIt shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids, why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff? It is not wise or healthy,\u201d he added. [\u2026]
Mike Cochran, another school board member, described parts of the book as \u201ccompletely unnecessary\u201d.
\u201cWe 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\u2019t explicit but it was in there,\u201d Cochran said.
\u201cWe don\u2019t 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\u2019t need all the nakedness and all the other stuff.\u201d
Cochran proposed revisiting the entire curriculum over concerns it was developed to \u201cnormalise sexuality, normalise nudity and normalise vulgar language.\u201d
\u201cIf I was trying to indoctrinate somebody\u2019s kids, this is how I would do it,\u201d he added. \u201cYou put this stuff just enough on the edges, so the parents don\u2019t catch it but the kids, they soak it in. I think we need to relook at the entire curriculum.\u201d
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\u2019d associate as closely with graphic, emotionally raw depictions of the fucking holocaust as I could.
That\u2019s why most sugary cereals have pictures of Auschwitz on the front.
\u201cIt shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids, why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff? It is not wise or healthy,\u201d he added. [\u2026]
just a guess here but I don\u2019t think the book by a Jewish author is pro-Holocaust. tumblr depiction equals endorsement brain over here
\u201cWe don\u2019t 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\u2019t need all the nakedness and all the other stuff.\u201d
man this really is peak Puritan isn\u2019t it. shocking: nudity. not shocking: the fucking Holocaust
maybe
TexasTennessee really really needs to normalise nudity and sexualityHaving 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\u2019t 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\u2019t 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 \u201cban\u201c 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\u2019s 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.\u201c School board bans teacher from teaching a book\u201d 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\u2019s ok), and the rest is up to the teacher. Taking a book off the \u201csuggested\u201d 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\u2019s 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\u2019m not sure I\u2019d even recognize a plot summary of The Scarlet Letter\u00a0if I saw it. My first instinct is that it\u2019s a Poe story but on second thought that seems wrong and I can\u2019t think of who else it might be.
I read Macbeth in 10th grade and Hamlet in 8th,\u00a0Catcher In The Rye in probably-8th.\n\n (Actually I\u2019d read most of Macbeth, Hamlet, and a half-dozen other Shakespeare plays, on my own time in like 4th grade.) We definitely don\u2019t have anything like that tier system; reading a Shakespeare tragedy is pretty close to A-tier importance but it\u2019s not universal, and which tragedy it is is pretty random. (Might be Romeo and Juliet instead, or even Julius\u00a0Caesar,\u00a0unlikely to be King Lear\u00a0but I wouldn\u2019t be shocked.) In terms of other books that I\u2019d say are considered\u00a0\u2018A-tier\u2019, probably Tom Sawyer\u00a0and/or Huckleberry Finn, neither of which my school taught at all. I also read\u00a0To Kill a Mockingbird, and that\u2019s a \u2018classic\u2019, but even reading that is probably regional.
There isn\u2019t 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.\u00a0Textbook writers usually just publish the one version so everyone ends up using Texas-approved books even if they don\u2019t like the biases.) There\u2019s some standards imposed by standardized testing, but they\u2019re heavily contested, and so the only ones with any teeth are for math and an \u2018English\u2019 test that is testing only reading comprehension and ability to string together coherent sentences. Even the \u2018write a five-paragraph essay\u2019 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\u2019re really\u00a0small. 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\u00a0the rep themselves - the kind of pearl-clutcher that gets offended by Maus\u00a0is 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 \u2013 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 \u2013 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.
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