Maus and The “Ban”
Altered picture. Original picture Third panel from first page of “Maus” (1972) by Art Spiegelman via Wikimedia Commons
This is false outrage.
My son’s school reading list for ninth grade has one hundred and seventy-three titles. The Library of Congress has roughly forty million cataloged titles and that’s just books published in the United States. If we follow the logic of the latest moral panic, that means my son’s school has banned thirty-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, eight hundred and twenty-seven books and that’s just domestic production if we follow the current opinion.
A Tennessee school board has decided to no longer have Maus on its reading list. Saints and angels preserve us.
You can still get a copy of Maus in Tennessee. You can go to a local bookstore and if they don’t have it you can order it. You can get it from Amazon. Thanks to the hyped-up reaction to the idea that a book is going to be taught but not another book Streisand effect its sales are through the roof. It’s the number seven bestselling book on Amazon. This is not samizdat.
The act of assembling a reading list, even assembling a library, is an act of censorship. You can’t have it all. That means you have to decide on what you want. This is not banning. It’s discerning.
Imagine you run a library and it’s full. The shelves are packed, and you have an angry restocker glaring at you because the return bin is overloaded and those two tiered carts that I don’t know what to call other than maybe a trolly are teetering with stacks that need to get to the stacks. Some pressure is put on you because you don’t have a copy of Maus and you decide that easiest path is to make room for a copy. What do you get rid of? What did you just ban if we’re pretending that not including is akin to running something out of the public sphere?
If you think that a book with boobs and cursing belongs in an eighth grade classroom, great. Make your case. The McMinn County Schoolboard disagrees.
I read Maus years ago and thought it was very impressive. I think I gave my brother a copy for Christmas. Maybe it was my dad. It was a while ago. It’s on the shelves here at home should my kids want to pick it up because I think they (age nine and fifteen) can handle such things, but that’s my call as a parent.
Around that same time, I read the A.N. Roquelaure, a pseudonym Ann Rice used, Sleeping Beauty trilogy. That was filthy. I have to applaud her because I hate half measures and she went full on filthy with fantasy erotica. There were scenes that made my calloused cheeks blush.
I don’t think that trilogy should be included in a curriculum meant for minors. Did I just ban her books?
There are all manner of reasons for limiting a reading list in a school district. Teacher familiarity is prime. They have to be able to spot the Cliff’s Note’s readers and loading an extra thirty-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand eight hundred and twenty-seven titles to their repertoire is asking a bit much.
Tennessee is not ceasing to teach literature. They are just changing the literature they are teaching. I’d be interested to know what the Maus fans will say about the book that replaced Maus if Maus gets reinstated. I bet they won’t say they banned it.
These histrionics need to stop. Setting a curriculum is by its nature limiting.
Fundamentally, this, along with the CRT bills, is part of a power struggle between politicians and voters on one side and unelected bureaucrats on the other.
People are making a bunch of noises about free speech, but teachers and other public school employees work for the government and hold a captive audience of students who are legally required to attend, so they have no free speech rights while on the clock, any more than I have the right to say whatever I want at work with no consequences. We can say whatever we want on our own time, to an audience of voluntary listeners our readers.
I think that there are good arguments for giving deference to experts, but there are limits to this (positive vs. normative issues), and teachers aren’t really experts in the sense that, say, physicists or virologists are experts. They don’t generally publish peer-reviewed research, and even EdD programs aren’t really on the same level as a PhD. Educational techniques don’t usually go through clinical trials like medical treatments do. That’s not to say that there aren’t a lot of good teachers out there, but as a group, they don’t have the authoritative level of expertise that experts in some other fields have.
That said, voters can be pretty dumb as a group, as well. So I don’t think there’s any reliable rule as to when elected politicians should overrule the school system, and for what little it matters, I choose who to side with on an issue-by-issue basis.Report
Great piece! Thanks for sharing it!
I admit to being puzzled the past week by several people I know who are actively pro-censorship – calling for various pundits and authors to be banned from society and even from getting their works published for Not-Particularly-Badthink or Minor-League-Sexpesting – posting warm and fuzzy memes about how terrible censoring books is.
Sherman Alexie was basically character assassinated – denied awards, had his latest book fail to be “paperbacked” despite being by all accounts a fabulous book that people wanted to read, and has had his name and works expunged from various scholarly works on Native authors because he made passes (of the sort that used to be fully allowed at the time they were made) and entered into relationships with an imbalance of power. And you all know I am perfectly willing to call out a bad guy, but this wasn’t bad guy stuff, it was typical male a-hole stuff. So people who actively comply with a worldview that supports this mindset of obliterating people from the public sphere, coming at me with sad memes about how terrible it was his book got banned by a public school…a school whose job it is to protect CHILDREN, not grown ass adults…is befuddling.Report
I believe it’s Will Truman do used to say this all the time, but focusing on the hypocrisy instead of the offense itself is a sure sign people don’t actually care about the offenseReport
you’re right, we should focus on the offense of a book being removed from a school curriculumReport
It may surprise you to learn that Huck Finn has been on the banned book lists since, I dunno, before I was in school, and I ain’t no spring chicken. It was bad to ban it then; it’s bad to ban it now. See? That wasn’t hard. I didn’t even have to talk about Dr. Seuss.
By the way, to your comment below, folks have been banning Harry Potter since it first came out as well, because they think witchcraft is of the devil. If it’s now being banned because of Rowling’s ridiculous and dangerous views on gender as well, then we’ve got two groups to criticize for doing something bad. And again, we don’t even have to mention Dr. Seuss.Report
Still wrong, not unlike Donald Trump’s “grab ’em by the pu$$y” was wrong. Men who think and act like that won’t ever get to date my daughters, no, they don’t deserve a pass just because they come from marginalized groups.Report
I think my favorite was seeing someone who’d spoken angrily and at length against JK Rowling’s anti-trans views approvingly re-post a picture of a bookstore’s “BANNED BOOKS COLLECTION”…which included Harry Potter.Report
Many people angered by JK Rowling’s statements are also fans of Harry Potter. This has created a quandary. Still, it’s entirely possible to speak out against Rowling’s views, remain a fan of her creations, and oppose censorship of her work. (Many handle HP Lovecraft’s works in the same way–though his racist views are much more apparent in his stories than Rowling’s anti-trans views are in hers.)
As told, your example doesn’t necessarily contain a contradiction.Report
Far too many of the commenters around here don’t do well with nuance, or they think they are being clever by trying to beat the rest of us up for our nuance.
YMMVReport
Yeah, those people are the worst.Report
Nice read; perhaps we should all approach stories like this–book banning and ::gasp:: CRT–with asking “when should school curriculums be newsworthy?”
I, for one, am tired of Joe and Jane Johnson tossing around the term “pedagogy” with abandon.
Now, if you will excuse me, I am off to buy A.N. Roquelaure’s Sleeping Beauty trilogy.Report
Hide those books on a high, kid inaccessible, shelf.Report
Why? Last time I checked kids who are well read and curious can find that sort of thing anyway. Considering that that body of work focuses on a woman exploring her sexuality and becoming empowered as she does I suspect a lot of confused, sexually unsure teenagers need to read it.Report
if you haven’t read the books then this is a very funny comment
if you have read the books then bruhReport
I have read them all. Introduced to the collection by my wife when we were dating. And my comment still stands.Report
lol
yeah
the part where the woman is raped and tortured until she develops PTSD and can no longer conceive of sexual interaction that doesn’t involve abuse is definitely a valid mode of sexual expression that’s healthy for teenagers to contemplateReport
I suspect several of our BDSM oriented members would like a word . . .Report
BDSM is very much focused on consent. Indeed, that’s part of the attraction.
Anne Rice’s “Sleeping Beauty” books are very much focused on the lack of consent. Indeed, that’s part of the attraction.Report
I know that some people here hate being told that BSDI, but BSDI.Report
the partisan robots use it as an excuse to be mad they can’t get everyone else to feel their angst. but in the junkies’ defense it’s also often used as a “hey look over here” strategy.
what made me particularly wince about that story was this:
““I think it is still possible to teach this book to forge a conversation about, ‘How do we talk about racial and class and gender differences?’ But, I think it would need to be taught very different than how it has traditionally been taught as an example of ‘Atticus Finch is the greatest man on the face of this planet,’” Liu added.”
i don’t think that’s how it’s ever been taught by the competent – it’s very clear finch is limited by his own beliefs and feelings – and if it weren’t professionally advantageous for her to pretend not to know that, i’d wonder if she actually knew that.
this is also not a “ban” of course. but it’s still a bad impulse.Report
The student in the video clip mentions that he feels the book is problematic because of the “white savior complex.” I hear this a lot, but I also frequently hear that white people have a special responsibility to use our white privilege to stand up to racism. Maybe this just reflects a legitimate division within the Anti-Racist (sic) movement, but it’s not one that I’ve ever heard of, and it sure seems like a lot of people are just regurgitating canned talking points without worrying about little things like internal consistency.Report
Always strikes me as a handy rubric for when someone wants something to be bad. Is it bad because of white savior, or is it bad because the white people don’t do enough?Report
Both of these things are true, and entirely consistent – if you’ve read any actual Black people writing on being anti-racist. And there are many. “whites” created racist systems, and we have the power because of that to break them down. That’s the privilege part. That’s the HOW part.
The White Savior part is about how a great many white people don’t approach this work from the stand point of black people being equals as is, but needing to be “saved from the system.” Its still an approach that looks down at black people. its also the WHY part.Report
I’d say this wasn’t worth the histrionics if the school board’s explanations didn’t come across as if they didn’t actually read the source material. Or that within the past month in Tennessee, a religious adoption agency used what was ostensibly a law to keep gays from adopting to do the same to a Jewish couple:
https://www.knoxnews.com/story/news/politics/2022/01/20/holston-united-methodist-home-for-children-adoption-tennessee-refused-family-jewish/6582864001/
Ancedotal, of course, but still things that make you go ‘hmm’. Especially when a local Jewish lawmaker up here got a visit from some ‘patriots’ telling him to bend the knee to the cross.
https://www.news5cleveland.com/news/democracy-2020/ohio-politics/protesters-allegedly-supporting-trump-gather-outside-state-rep-weinsteins-hudson-home
And the notion that you can just buy a copy is a nice thought from people who have the money or parental accessibility to obtain it. I remember reading Maus as a kid from a copy in the local county library, graphic novels being something of a luxury for our family.
And as far as what replaced it in the library, well, what did replace it? Was it replaced? i’d sure like to know if they still have copies of Mein Kampf lying around.
And you can say histrionics, sure. But when anti-vax quackery went from lefty woo to sliding into GOP campaign platforms in record time, well, tell me its histrionics to believe that other fringe ideas with money to back them – say, anti-semitism – aren’t gonna find their way there next.Report
The board looked into replacing a few panels but were warned that there would be copyright issues. They clearly read the source materials. Nobody is that good at darts.
There seems to be an idea that without Maus, serialized in 1980, there was no teaching about the holocaust. That’s nonsense.Report
counterpoint: removing maus for what they offered up as reasoning should be seen as offensive to american values, creative expression, and the human spirit more generally. or at the very least, it exists as a record of the low esteem in which they hold their students and families.
(when the fundamental stated objections to a book about the multi-generational impact of the holocaust is concern about incidental nudity and bad words, i have to wonder whether they’re joking.)
yes, the partisan anxiety junkies will hold this one event as a symbol via all sorts of hyperbole – ceasing to teach history, anti-semetism, etc etc and so forth. sure, it’s an overreach by a population only fueled by fears of the coming civil war or whatever is going on with the memetic ketamine drip of their daily show space brain. noted.
but getting hung up on this (intentional or unintentional, as it is hard to tell these days) rhetorical choice over “banning” skips over what i see as the larger issue.
at the end of the day, the school board is stepping into a curricular matter for reasons of cultural struggle, not academic evaluation; if it was a genuine attempt at academic evaluation, they should probably be ashamed of themselves. we’ll see a lot more of these kinds of incidents, i fear, and the spate of largely unconstitutional “crt”/crt/dei/whatever laws is just the beginning on the legislative side. these are all, generally speaking, terrible choices enacted for mostly dumb reasons.
(that it is also a proxy war for the larger political struggle over whose pmc-directed view of racial essentialism will win out is even more depressing)
to be sure, the vast majority of it also generally looks and feels to me like a fundraising effort for certain pols disguised as “doing something”. especially the blatantly nonsensical “don’t make kids feel bad” standard promoted by rufo and enabled by the idiots who rush to defend the worst individual examples of terrible dei trainings because otherwise you’re “letting them win” or whatever is going on in these poor addicts minds.
on top of that, the loudest engines of the mass-idiot-making power of partisan identity enhances the power of these maneuvers because of their ultimate value as proof of evil in an uprooted world (and thus can be fundraised against by all, pro and con).
tl;dr i hate everyone.Report
As Potter Stewart once said, “I know it when I see it.”Report
I agree that Rufo-inspired, probably unconstitutional statutes is not the right answer. But the Dr. Frankenstein in all of this is the progressive faction that spent the last 5 or 6 years secretly sneaking Kendi/DiAngelo style DEI nonsense into the schools, often at tax payer expense. One of the more under discussed aspects of the Loudon, VA kerfuffle is the $500k spent on the most obnoxious variety of these contractors.
Now they’ve predictably resurrected a monster mostly dormant since the ‘intelligent design’ wars. Of course it wants to use this opportunity to get in various forms of petty moralism and anti-intellectualism that’s always bubbling under the surface.
What we need is small-l liberalism. That includes voting out school board members who support this kind of DEI wherever possible and CRA lawsuits against schools, teachers, and administrators who take its racist thinking to its natural conclusion.
Only then will it IMO be possible to take to the fight against populist illiberalism. But it can’t be done with these White Fragility or Anti-Racist Baby people. They’re just the other side of the same coin.Report
i think of the dei stuff like i did about dare when i was a kid – it’s the background noise of the grownups “doing something”. i don’t really care about it, even in the context of my kid. for the most part, i think there’s obviously some extremely bad training out there, a few good ones, and a whole bunch of expensive nothingburgers attempting to impact a multivariate issue with a singular avenue and a bunch of magic words.
i’ve read a lot of critical theory, by accident and on purpose, and i am not particularly impressed by the pop-academic stylings of the racial essentialist ding dongs who are building these trainings. i think they end up sounding like teddy roosevelt most of the time, if tr fell sleep during the middle of some colonialism and came up with an extended riff on hundreds of hours of “white people drive like this v. black people drive like this” jokes, but for “justice”.
(i believe in structural racism, but i’m also not a commie, so i feel torn, ya know?)
but at the end of the day i am *far* more concerned with the rufos rather than kendis of the world. kendi has his lucrative market share, but he’s nowhere near the power needed so he can set up his extra-judicial fascist anti racism review board to exercise dictatorial power over the other branches of government. it’s not a good look, but that’s on him.
the rufos, however, are actively trying to use the state to do horrendous things with far more long-reaching impact than some kid learning that pencil shavings are white supremacy, just like i learned that pot leads to heroin. the scope of most of these legislations are, it feels, purposefully absurd so they can fail outright or be challenged in court. heck the challenging would probably be a significant bonus multiplier for all parties looking for the next big thing to raise cash. it would seem the best option is to find something that’s just unconstitutional enough, then running around with hundos stuffed in your pants for “justice”.
tl;dr i am the god of centrismReport
I take the Kendi crap more seriously- but I live in an area where he has a bit of a constituency, and where the man himself has been retained to ‘audit’ the school district. No doubt he’ll do it in a way that is entirely rational and make recommendations that are totally a good and effective use of resources. I’m also concerned it follows the path you hear about in some of these places, with enlightened racial segregation and similar stuff. It’s sickening.
But look, if I’m a state legislator I’m not voting for one of these ‘anti-CRT’ bills either, not that there would ever be one around these parts. I’m not trying to do the whole enlightened centrism thing but I do believe that if liberals don’t fight or at least very seriously temper this stuff populists and reactionaries will. I’m 100% in agreement with you that if that happens we’ll be worse off for it, and it will be a lot harder to correct.Report
ok that’s fair – i’d be at least partially jaundiced in the eyeball on any formal consultancy, to be sure. (or fully, really, but ya know – trying to be fair to own the conservalibs)
i’m actually slightly surprised out here in trumpland that we haven’t had something like this over books happen yet. i keep my eyes on the board meetings and am plugged in enough with both local educators as well as local partisans here that i’d have some degree of early warning coming down the pipe.Report
If you’re out where I think you are it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a bit of a truce. There are a lot of livelihoods and other material interests connected to the university. I’d imagine people understand that to make it work you need professors and administrators willing to have families there. Turning the schools into a culture war battle isn’t in anyone’s interest, even where one side could easily out vote the other.
But that gets to the heart of it IMO, which is that perceptions are going to be very colored by local conditions, interests, and disputes. I’m cynical enough to think that true believers are few and far between. It’s more about whether taking a side can advance some other political or bureaucratic agenda, with the average unsuspecting tax payer caught in between.Report
Or maybe some of what Kendri says and writes feels like a direct attack on you (intentionally or not) but nothinh Rufo says or writes does because you are already part of the majority structure.Report
Heh, whatever I am, I’m not sure it’s part of the ‘majority structure,’ not in my zip code. But it’s really the opposite. Rufo has no influence where I live, and certainly not on the people who run the local schools. Kendi very much does. As I said up thread, he has literally been retained.
I know it’s quaint but I actually think racial segregation and these other reductive ideas are a great evil. That’s what Kendi can lead to. And really I’d appreciate if you made it less personal. From my perspective you and people like you have no actual skin in this game. It’s all just another abstraction where terms like ‘majority structure’ get thrown around like they actually mean something. I on the other hand have to navigate this stuff with a real live kid.Report
I have nieces and a nephew who are half black. I have skin. I am also attempting to raise good humans in the south . I have skin.
And Saul, as a human and an American has skin. Because he wants a better America. I want a better America. You want a better America.
To presume otherwise – to, as Koz says, believe we aren’t as good as you in this fight because we aren’t exactly, not quite you – is insulting. And if you happen to be a white male, then yes, you are who the system is deigned for and who the system supports. Same as me. So we both have the same skin in the game.Report
If Saul doesn’t want it to be personal then he shouldn’t make it personal. He regularly accuses people of being motivated not by reason and belief but by identity. The one time I fired back about his identity it was removed by a mod so I’m not going down that path again. However I think it’s fair to say that people who use a public service generally have a greater interest in how it is administered than those who don’t.
You’ve mentioned before that you have concerns about how certain racial and historical topics are handled by schools where you live. I’m in no position to assess those assertions but it’s really between you and your local and state officials.
I, however, live in one of the most racially diverse parts of the country where progressive, blue America is in complete control. Conservatives may as well not even exist when it comes to how local services work. So when you say that I’m motivated by some jargon about race/sex structures or whatever it comes off not only as insulting but totally clueless. If I really was then I wouldn’t be raising a family where I am to begin with.Report
I don’t vote for serial rapists, misogynistic a$$holes and narcissistic bigots.Report
The aristocrats!Report
“People are trying to get books like Maus banned because they are afraid that if their children read them, they will have different values than the values their parents want them to have. That’s really what this is about. People are looking at books as dangerous knowledge. In the library field, we say we never know how any individual person will react to a book. But people who ban and challenge books collectivize everybody. They say, “Well, I read this book and it disturbs me.” Or “My child will read this book and they will be disturbed. Therefore, everybody will have this feeling about the book.” We could ban books. We could ban something like The Turner Diaries, a white supremacist book from the ’70s. But that’s saying that everybody who reads that will end up agreeing with the author. We actually don’t know. In my work, we are agnostic in terms of reading effects. I link this to the Reformation and the importance of the doctrine of sola scriptura, the idea that reading could actually save your soul. People really believe that reading has metaphysical effects….Our schools have always been sites of contestation. We’re one of the only wealthy countries where you can just decide to take your children out of school and home-school them. That’s just not possible in, say, France. That just doesn’t happen. Americans are true believers that education should take place in the home, and that handing children over to strangers for education is somewhat problematic. So giving your children over to strangers, and strangers are teaching about a society rife with white supremacy, you think, Well, I’m a white person. What is this teacher saying about me? It suddenly becomes very personalized when people talk like this. They’re not necessarily talking about each individual person, but the structures of the society.”
https://slate.com/human-interest/2022/01/maus-banned-tennessee-holocaust-graphic-novel.htmlReport
100% agree.Report
You know how I read this response? White man calls white man, a ‘white man’ and believes he has made a cogent point. I’m sorry to tell you this, but you haven’t. By you and Philip’s own logic your takes on this subject are themselves unreliable and based in white supremacy, because of your race and sex.
You may think you’re stating some kind of uncomfortable truth but really you’re making an excuse to avoid grappling with the complex realities of modern life.Report
and, like the DARE stuff, there was always That Kid who took it way more seriously than the rest of us, more seriously than probably even the adults intended, but was really serious about it to the point where Resisting Drugs had clearly become a fundamental part of their personality…Report
How do you figure that the CRT bills are unconstitutional? I’m not familiar with the individual state constitutions, so there may be issues in some states, but I don’t see how they’d run afoul of the US Constitution. There are no First Amendment issues, because teachers have very limited First Amendment protections in the classroom, since, as I noted upthread, they’re working for the government and teaching a captive audience. State governments absolutely do have the authority to regulate public school curricula, unless a particular state’s constitution says otherwise.Report
I think even the better constructed are probably void for vagueness. That or they will need to be interpreted so generally as to not prohibit anything that isn’t already disallowed by existing federal and (many) state laws.Report
The vagueness is almost certainly the point.Report
they’re fundraising elements designed to separate rubes from cash, so the vagueness is definitely on purpose.
(i’m working with the theory because malice is more comforting than incompetence, as one can counter malice.)Report
Rufo cut his political advocacy teeth at the Discovery Institute which is the same place that tried to get intelligent design into curriculums back in the aughts. Whatever those folks are interested in, it isn’t quality education.Report
Republicans: “We want to ban books by black and LGBTQ authors.”
Pundits: “No, what they meant to say was that they really just object to crazy CRT and bad DEI.”
Republicans: “No, we really just want to ban books by black and LGBTQ authors. But thanks for the cover.”Report
Fun fact: People who read Maus grow up and learn not to compare minor inconveniences and life-saving medicine to the Holocaust.
I don’t buy the given reasons for banning Maus at face value.Report
Even the stated reasons are astonishingly awful.
“Hey, here’s a book showing people being stripped naked, tortured, and murdered by the millions.”
“Yeah, that nakedness really offends me. Best remove this.”Report
Worth noting that Maus was on the curriculum, not merely the reading list. This isn’t removing one of dozens of books; it’s the removal of a book they purposefully read and discussed. This is a much bigger deal than removing something from the reading list, though given their justifications for removing it, that would still be very bad, despite your ridiculous attempts to minimize it (if you’re such a prude that naked mice on their way to the gas chamber strikes you as salacious, the problem is entirely yours).Report
Can you distinguish between “this is a bad decision” and “this is a *ban*”? There’s no reason to insist on the word itself — it’s just the usual semantic hitchhiking that’s good for pointless arguments and not much else. No one will be convinced by calling it a “ban” who would not already be convincible from the facts themselves.Report
“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”-Satre, Anti-Semite and Jew.
The issue here is that it is playing into the hands of people who, at the very least, get defensive for whatever reason, in favor of the school district and parents who lead the charge to remove Maus from the curriculum. It is again the kind of tightrope that right-wingers have deployed against liberals and the left since the Bush II years, if not decades before. We are required to be as targeted as a vascular surgeon in order not to unleash the screeching howler monkeys looking for the slightest misstatement. They get to run free in semantics. Even when we have the precision of a vascular surgeon, the sreeching howler monkeys come out anyway. I say no to this and no to playing their games. It is a ban in effect if not intent.Report
I don’t really care what we call it, though this would definitely be called a ban on the most well-known banned and challenged book list. It’s bad any way you look at it, and attempts to defend the backwardness of the justification, as in the OP, are just disgusting.Report
I suppose the test would be if the school found a replacement like Night by Elie Wiesel and then seeing how school district reacts. We read Night in high school because the mid-1990s was still a time when English departments across the land would be aghast at including a graphic novel in the curriculum. If the parents also objected to Night, it would be a reveal.Report
Yeah, we read Night as well. I don’t think I had even heard of Maus until college or maybe grad school.Report
The funny thing for me was that I heard about Maus through comics fandom well before I heard about anything telling personal stories of the Holocaust. Like, for me it was “there’s this comic book that tells an allegorical story of the Holocaust”, not “there’s this story of the Holocaust and it’s an allegorical comic book”.Report
When I was in my New York suburban high school in the mid to late 1990s, Maus wasn’t on the curriculum because it was a comic book. This was in a public high school that was majority Jewish and where many kids were the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors. Sometime after I graduated high school, graphic novels became acceptable for high schools to put on the curriculum. I’m not sure what I entirely make of this.Report
I like Maus, though it’s a bit overrated. Both my kids read it probably around middle school age. I like comic books, but have absolutely no problem eliminating comic books from school requirements. I believe there are some serious long-term consequences of post-literate society.Report
I’m divided on the issue. I don’t want to dismiss comic books and graphic novels out of hand as for the sub-literate but at the same time share your concerns about long-term consequences of a post-literate society. But a lot of people really don’t like reading for pleasure. Even very well educated people who go to elite schools and have high paying six or seven figure jobs don’t like reading for pleasure. A best selling book can be in the tens of thousands of units sold while a popular streaming series will have viewership in the millions.Report
I think there is a reasonable place you can get to that allows a broader set of things to be available in the school library than would make it into a curriculum. I remember in elementary school everyone fighting to check out those Scary Stories books with the terrifying illustrations. The educational value was not high but they got a lot of kids, boys in particular, reading something when they probably otherwise wouldn’t be reading at all.Report
“In the first place God made idiots. That was for practice. Then he made school boards.” Mark Twain
Elected school boards had the reputation of being filled with overly censorious busybodies living out their little dramas since Mark Twain was alive at least. We probably shouldn’t have elected school boards but have the entire thing run at the state, county, or city level as a bureaucratic appointed department. This has two advantages. It doesn’t allow people who really shouldn’t be making decisions about education power over the curriculum and it. also provides clearer lines of responsibility. If the parents as a whole aren’t happy with the schools, they know it is the governors, mayor, or county supervisor’s fault.
In my ideal universe, public education would be run by the federal government in the United States like the national governments of France or Japan run their public schools. That is probably impossible, so the federal government should set standards and the state governments should run the public schools in centralized manner at state level. My Japanese girlfriend is shocked at the lack of standardization in just about everything in the United States. In Japan, not only are the text books standardized at the national level but so is the school equipment in terms of bags, pens, pencils, calligraphy sets, etc. This might be a bit much for everybody else though. She also finds it weird that kids have to return their text books at the end of the school year while in Japan kids keep their text books.Report
What happens with many hot button cultural issues is there is a widespread set of problems and one example becomes the incident thing everybody knows. It’s the big story that represents the entire issue. That is Maus. The CRT is the boogieman and scares us so much was always going to lead to this. They said it. There is a rash of books being taken out of school due to LBGTQ issues or race issues. The people scared of the boogieman were always out to get things they hated out of school. So guys/gals that are “free speech lovers” but jumped on the CRT is the boogieman here you go. You asked for this, you were told this is where it was going to go and now lets see how loud you howl now. From what i have seen over the past few weeks the “Free speech is vital and CRT makes so scared crowd” doesnt’ actually care much about free speech.Report
Kto? Kogo?Report
???? Huh , no idea Jay.
First google search entry is for this:
Who, whom?
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“Comrade Lenin Cleanses the Earth of Filth.” (Mikhail Cheremnykh and Viktor Deni, 1920)
Who, whom? (Russian: кто кого?, kto kogo?; Russian pronunciation: [kto.kɐˈvo]) is a Bolshevist principle or slogan which was formulated by Lenin in 1921.
Lenin is supposed to have stated at the second All-Russian Congress of Political Education Departments, on 17 October 1921,
Весь вопрос—кто кого опередит?
“The whole question is—who will overtake whom?”Report
Whatever the original context is, the meaning it’s taken on nowadays is more “Who (is doing what) to whom?”Report
Okay. Not familiar with it. I mean i know i’m a liberal so the assumption is i am familiar with all of Comrade Lenin’s great sayings and i can’t get enough of the riveting drama of the second all russian congress of political education. Not as much rowdy sexy fun as the forth congress in Stalingrad in 36 with Stalin got loaded and put that lampshade made of kulak skin on his head.Report
You know that you can read books that haven’t been assigned, right?
Hrm. Maybe this is the root of the problem.Report
The pro free speech/pro conservative moral panic about marginalized people having books in school voice has logged on.
Yes aware of that. Glad Maus is selling well. In the past when some media has become controversial that fact that is was also widely available was not a balm to the free speech soul. I vividly remember a massive freak out when one streamer took Gone with Wind temporally but it was available 92 other places didnt’ seem to matter. History still exists even after statues are taken down.
Why is it conservatives are so aware of all the things Comrade Lenin said? Maybe we need more teaching about the great all russian political education congresses in school. These things seem vital to know.Report
We need to teach history. WAIT CRAP NO NOT THAT HISTORYReport
Heavy sigh. Yes jay that is exactly the point. Eyes roll. If you treat everything as meta, whatever that means, then you never really need to know any details.
The school boards in question all seem to have right to take books about the Holocaust, LGBTQ, slavery, etc out of school. The point is there is a moral panic by white conservative folks about marginalized groups having media in schools and having some of it taught. That is the topic. Zoom out to low earth orbit and well everything looks the same when you are that far above us.Report
Lotta moral panics out there. They’re all white conservatives?
Huh.Report
Good thing i never said. But i can see why it’s best to try the BSDI argument. It does suggest there is nothing to defend in the current moral panic if BSDI is the go to debating tactic.Report
Greg, I know that you think that you can refute someone pointing out that you’re ignoring somewhat universal dynamics by yelling “BSDI!”
But that doesn’t work.
Seriously. It’s not even a fallacy.
Argue “you’re changing the subject!”, maybe. Argue “it’s good when we do it!”
But when someone points out that this dynamic happens a hell of a lot more than your current laser focus, they’re certainly not going to be refuted by four letters that don’t even disagree with the point.Report
This is why I pushed back against the idea that “censorship is always bad”.
Because that just makes it simple for someone to find a case of censorship elsewhere and easy peasy, the initial charge is defeated.
Defeated, without having to so much as make any logical argument at all.
Like, censoring a book which is false and racist is equated to censoring a book which is truthful and accurate.
When the equation is laid out bluntly like this, the flaw becomes obvious.
When it is just hidden behind “Censorship!!1!” it can remain hidden.Report
if you expand censorship to mean just about anything, then your point stands. if curating a collection is censorship, then, like, what isn’t. “i brushed my teeth this morning with one brand of toothbrush and censored all the rest” (which seems like a dirty sentence taken out of context if you bracket [censored])
but censorship is always bad.Report
There isn’t any logical theory that leads to this conclusion.
Not in law, not in logic not in even moral theory.
What your words mean, if taken at face value, is that all speech is protected, without exception.
Is that actually your meaning ?
The history of speech law has vast areas where speech can be modified, regulated, bounded, or suppressed outright.
Are you rejecting all that?
What normally happens right about now is people just start haggling about definitions which leads nowhere as this thread shows.
Worse, it allows people to shift the focus from what is being suppressed and why, to just the definition which can be endlessly gamed and further deflected.Report
KTO is an interesting football site. And just about as relevant.Report
I don’t know how many times I have to say this for it to sink in: This is not a free speech issue. Teachers do not have free speech rights in the classroom. They’re employees of the state, teaching a captive audience legally required to attend.
I’ve pointed this out several times, and to the best of my recollection, nobody has offered any rebuttal of this point, yet you all keep repeating this absolute dog of a talking point.Report
This is a free speech issue. Is it a complete and total bad where the book is removed from all existence. No but few issues are ever rarely that stark. The board had the authorized power to remove the book from it’s curriculum.
No history was ever forgotten or erased due to a statue being taken down either but boy people seemed to think it was.
Maus and the all the other books are being taken our of libraries/schools/curriculum because some people want to restrict kids from seeing things that talk about slavery, LBGTQ, etc issues. That is free speechy as all hell. It’s less about the teachers free speech rights, which are very limited. But it is about what the kids can read. The people wanting books out in this current conservative moral panic are trying to keep the voices of various marginalized groups out of school. That is as free speech as it gets and it’s aimed directly at the all the groups current conservatives seemed scared of and who directly blamed for the CRT boogieman.
Kids are not legally required to attend public school. Plenty of options out there. I’m also an employee of the state so i know exactly what i can and can’t say on the job.
Before people throw the silliest rebuttal in the world, plenty of liberal types have tried to get books thrown out of schools for all the dumbest reasons. I’m against them, just like i’m against the current moral panic.Report
“Is it a complete and total bad[sic] where the book is removed from all existence.”
well i guess it’s a good thing that’s not what is happening here, then!Report
Yes, the task of assembling a reading list for public schools is defacto censorship.
So now the question for us as citizens, is what policy preferences should we direct our schools to have?
What books and expressions do we want to present to students, and what do we want to avoid?
The outrage isn’t that “a book was omitted”.
The outrage is the thinking behind that action, expressed clearly by the transcripts and reasoning of the school board who ostensibly acts on our behalf.
They weren’t trying to protect children from obscenity, they were trying to flush an uncomfortable history down the memory hole.Report
I’m not sure if America’s intensely localized public school system makes this issue better or worse. The theory of having a localized public school system is that each school district could regulate its curriculum for what the community could tolerate. This meant that 12th grade social studies in my high school could be an Introduction to Western Philosophy and we could read Narcissus and Goldmund and a Wizard of Earthsea in English class because the parents were fine with it being educated liberal professionals for the most part. In a more conservative town in Suffolk County, the curriculum could be tailored for that towns needs.
Now we know that this sort of localized curriculum doesn’t do well to maintain the public peace in practice. Liberal and conservatives and conservatives get angry at what gets taught and doesn’t get taught in other school districts. Lots of conservative parents during the 1990s would be aghast at the curriculum of my public high school and call it anti-Christian and anti-American. Same with the present. Likewise liberals, but I’m more sympathetic towards this anger, get outraged about what they see as the omissions and falsities taught in conservative school districts. So we have this situation where everybody wants a national or at least state wide curriculum that reflects their values even but can’t agree on it and find that allowing districts to be wildly different intolerable.Report
An interesting thing to do—in light of book “bans” and uproar over “CRT” is to go back and watch the movie “Inherit the Wind.”
The movie obviously takes some liberties from the real story, but it’s a well-done depiction of battles is education / speech / society.
None of this is new.Report
I was in that play in high school as Cates, the fictionalized Scopes. I read a lot about the trial back then. It seems like the anti-science anti-Darwinism charge was popularized when what he was really teaching was pro eugenics. There are many conflicting takes and I read all of what I know about it in high school, but Darrow was disingenuous and Bryan had an ax to grind as well. My remembered take was that he was teaching eugenics and doing a motte and bailey defense. I haven’t revisited the matter and I’m willing to be wrong.Report
Inherit the Wind was one of the things they had us Young Earth Creationists read as part of our evangelism. Alongside the transcripts of the trial.
“Why would ‘Science’ need to lie about what happened? Propaganda needs to lie about what happened. Science does not.”
That sort of thing.Report
This is a common creationist myth. Scopes was not teaching eugenics.Report
It’s not a creationist myth. If it’s a myth at all, and it seems unlikely that it is, it’s shared by a great many who either agree or disagree with the theme of Inherit the Wind, be they creationists or not.Report
It was started by creationists. If it has spread among conservatives who are not creationists, so much the worse for creationists.
It is undeniable that evolution was used to justify eugenics. There is no evidence that Scopes was teaching eugenics, and I challenge you to find some if you’re just gonna throw out things like that.Report
The myth arises, is you’re not aware, from the textbook from which Scopes taught. If you know the story, the ACLU and Scopes worked together, teaching one chapter of the textbook ACLU provided. The chapter was not on eugenics. The book does have discussions of social Darwinism, but that’s but what Scopes taught, and he only taught evolution the one time, specifically to provide a test case.
Creationists began using this to claim that Scopes was teaching eugenics decades later, as the debate over evolution in schools began to wage again.Report
Just as more evidence, from the Wikipedia page:
“A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems (usually referred to as just Civic Biology) was a biology textbook written by George William Hunter, published in 1914. It is the book which the state of Tennessee required high school teachers to use in 1925 and is best known for its section about evolution that was ruled by a local court to be in violation of the state Butler Act. It was for teaching from this textbook that John T. Scopes was brought to trial in Dayton, Tennessee in the Scopes “Monkey” Trial.”
Note the part about the book literally being the required textbook.Report
That’s the truth. Scopes volunteered to be a test case: the book was required, evolution was in the book, teaching evolution was against the law.
The movie though…it’s haunting if you re-watch in light of the current environs.Report
From that book: https://eugenics.us/george-william-hunters-civic-biology-the-eugenics-textbook-at-the-heart-of-the-scopes-monkey-trial/205.htm
Denying eugenics in the text that preaches eugenics is wrong.Report
See my comment above where I say it does. But as you see above as well, it’s literally the required text book, including eugenics stuff, and all he did was teach from the banned chapter on evolution. And he did it entirely to end up in court. He didn’t teach eugenics, but as part of the required curriculum, Tennessee schools taught that black people were biologically inferior to white people.
Again, he used the required text, and taught the part that had been banned specifically because it talked of evolution. The required text.
You’re wrong, factually, and even the most basic research would show this. No shame in admitting it, but a great deal in doubling down on easily debunked falsehoods.Report
“yeah it was in there but he didn’t teach THAT PART” is not the king-hell killer comeback you seem to image, sirReport
The claim is that Scopes was teaching eugenics. He wasn’t. He taught from the assigned textbook, but from the banned chapter, specifically violate the law so that the ACLU could challenge it.
Was the book bad? Yes, but it was, to bring it back to the OP’s discussion, on the curriculum; it’s what was available to teach from, and the local courts had given the ACLU an opening for a challenge by ruling that the evolution sections of the book violated the law. All Scopes did was teach from the chapter he wasn’t supposed to.
Is the book bad? Oh yeah, but it is what was available to teach from. He wasn’t in trouble for teaching from the book that taught about differences between races; he was in trouble for teaching about evolution from that same book. Again, not teaching eugenics; teaching evolution. It’s literally the killer comeback I think it is. It shows that his assertion was false. No way around it.Report
“yeah it was in there but he didn’t teach THAT PART” is not the king-hell killer comeback you seem to image, sirReport
Dude, it was literally the state required textbook. He didn’t teach eugenics. The issue the school/law had with him was not eugenics. It was evolution. If you want to play weird games where you pretend not to understand the situation, so that the author of the OP’s dealing in old creationist myths doesn’t look as silly, feel free.Report
Vermont Republicans, everybody:
Proposing to ban negative viewpoints of the founding of America.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/01/31/gop-proposal-targets-negative-us-history/Report
Going to disagree here. The school board’s debate indicates that they specifically wanted to get rid of this book for extremely trivial reasons. Maus is one of the few books that is both approachable by kids and details the true horror of what happened. I suspect the board will go with some watered-down candyass depiction like the Boy in the Striped Pajamas or somesuch.
And as part of larger movement to strip curricula of anything that makes kids uncomfortable, it is very alarming.Report
The last sentence is the importance here, of removing anything that makes the kids’ PARENTS uncomfortable.
There isn’t a good faith effort being made to present different sources of history, or better ways to explain it.
The purpose of al these actions is to suppress an interpretation of history that the parents’ and conservatives disagree with.Report
There are three basic takes you can have here:
1. This book is within the bounds of what can reasonably be considered age-inappropriate for 13-year-olds, and this was a reasonable call, although not clearly correct.
2. This book is clearly fine, and this is one of a long line of instances of puritanical and hyperprotective parents getting unreasonably upset over adult subject matter in materials used in their children’s schools.
3. This school district is full of antisemitic Holocaust deniers who don’t want their children to be taught the Holocaust happened.
Not having read the book or having any strong opinions on what’s appropriate for 8th-graders, I’m leaning strongly towards #2 but can’t rule out #1. But I’m seeing the usual suspects post comments, clearly written with one hand, insinuating something along the lines of #3, and it’s not a good look.Report
The real issue people aren’t talking about enough is whether there’s potential for mouseboob exposure at a young age to create more furries. Maybe it will, and maybe it won’t, but is this a risk we can afford to take?Report
I have read the book. I read it in the 90’s, though, before it was something that was obviously something that 8th Graders needed to read. It was for mature audiences at the time.
There are a handful of things that I remember that stick with me.
The guy didn’t paint his father particularly well. He opened by complaining about his father’s frugality and gave the example of how his dad lived in I think it was a retirement apartment (or duplex) complex and gas was part of the rent. Since gas was free and matches cost money, dad left the back burner of the stove on 24/7. I thought that that level of detail was… I dunno. Unkind.
There were several chapters of things getting worse and worse and worse in Germany and then, several chapters in, after things got worse and worse and worse, there was a chapter titled “And here my troubles began”. Man, that was a gut punch.
His mother’s suicide is depicted and the guy asked what happened to his mother’s effects (including her diary) and the dad said that he couldn’t bear to keep them any more and so he got rid of them. The book ends with the guy leaving his dad’s house and fuming and calling his father a murderer.
So 25ish years later, that’s what I remember from the book.
But I only read it. I didn’t study it.Report
Imagine that you evaluate a book about the Holocaust as dirty on the basis of a few grainy pictures of naked prisoners. You have just become the poster child for why parents should not have more input into curriculum.Report
Here Are 50 Book Texas Parents Want Banned From School Libraries
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/texas-library-books-banned-schools-rcna12986
Wow I had no idea Ibram X. Kendi was such a prolific writer.Report