McMinn County Bans “Maus”, Pulitzer Prize Winning Holocaust Book
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I looked briefly through rather lengthy minutes [1] of the meeting. Objections seem to come down to usage of words like "bitch" and phrases like "god damn" that students would get in trouble for using in the hallways according to existing school rules. The participants seemed quite queazy about saying the objectionable words themselves and instead either referred by their abbreviations or spelling them out by letter.
One part of the discussion that was also interesting was they considered censoring the book with whiteout for the offending words and one naked drawing but decided against it. They thought they need to get permission from the author because of copyright laws. I believe these kind of redactions are considered fair use for education under copyright laws.
[1] https://core-docs.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/asset/uploaded_...
That having been said, the people debating the issue seem to be grossly intellectually unqualified to be deciding anything regarding the education of others, which should be very concerning.
I'd say they have the one qualification that actually matters here: they were elected specifically for this purpose by the residents of the school district.
Consider that these people are also likely eligible for jury duty, which could very well mean that they would be considered qualified to literally condemn someone to death. Thought of in that light, removing a book from the local school's curriculum seems downright inconsequential.
As evidence, I present this photograph, captioned: "A Congolese man looking at the severed hand and foot of his five-year-old daughter who was killed, and allegedly cannibalized, by the members of Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company militia."
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/father-hand-belgian-congo-1...
Although I happen to think that the reasons the school board used to arrive at its decision are dubious (I think eighth graders probably know and use worse language than the stuff they're handwringing over), if they can find something that works as effectively for the purposes of the curriculum then it all seems rather overblown.
They did ban it from the library.
The dubious reasons for the ban are actually really important; if that’s ok they will find dubious reasons to ban other books which make them feel uncomfortable as well. The concern seems justified to me.
When it's a legislative decision, and not the librarian's / teacher's.
In fact, those minutes indicate that the exact same book is being used in a freshman high school curriculum in the same county, which rather casts doubt on the assertion.
I should also be clear that, when I say I find the reasoning dubious, I do not mean to suggest that it is not based on a genuinely-held belief. I simply mean I think they're being unrealistic about what kids know/say.
It's such a shocking and ironic story that I almost wonder if someone planted the idea intentionally to shine a light on the stupid of these people.
We really must push back against this nonsense.
This is the most dry and mundane "book banning" I have ever heard of.
Furthermore, the minutes don't say anything about keeping it out of the school library which directly conflicts with what TFA alleges.
[1] https://core-docs.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/asset/uploaded_...
But furthermore, the reasons given strike me as extremely silly - I can’t remember any even mildly titillating nudity in Maus - the only nudity I can recall are piles of stripped corpses. And the idea that the phrase “god damn” is somehow inappropriate when coming from the testimony of a survivor of mass slaughter strikes me as bizarre. This sort of moralistic kneejerking is dangerous - something superficially objectionable can be found in a great many works of key significance. The girl at the napalm bombing of Trang Bang village is full frontal nudity - should we erase that powerful image from anything our children might learn? Sometimes nudity and profanity are simply a matter of what happened, and exorcising them means teaching a watered down version of the truth.
This is a bunch of self important educators banning a book over stuff that doesn't matter, not a bunch of ideologues banning a book because they don't like the message as one would think based on TFA and most of the comments in here.
Maybe the board really is ignorant of it content and only exist to quibble. If they are actually motivated to keep their kids ignorant, there is no way in hell they are going to say so in public! Either way, they are doing their kids a huge disservice.
And, regardless of intentions, this is a poster-child example of dubious book-banning. You might as well re-write '1984' because you think kids can't handle mean characters. Or, similarly: https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/26/media/china-fight-club-ending...
This is a very different story than most people here are making it out to be.
https://www.tmz.com/2022/01/26/chuck-palahniuk-not-mad-china...
[1] "When we see something on television that is a direct quote from an actor or a president,something where it has that inappropriate language, they will blur it out or white out parts of it or they will bleep it"
I'm quite shocked there are adults uncomfortable with reading those types of words enough to decide 8th graders would also be. In a book about the Holocaust, where that's going to be among the last things noticed..
> We understand some of this language is objectionable. When we think about the author’s intent, I could argue that his intent was to make our jaws drop. Oh my goodness, think about what happened and what it would have been like to have lived during that time period and that shock. So, the author chose to use those words, we understand they are objectionable, we understand our community and our families and that’s not something that we see is needed to be spelled out in our book, so we felt it was appropriate to white that out.
> What we have done in anticipation of any of those concerns, we prepared a parent letter to go home to inform them of this topic we are about to study. We went ahead and took the step to censor that explicit content and we went ahead and made sure that all of our books are stamped “property of MCS” so that if one does come up for some reason, hey look at these words we are teaching in school, no, that’s not one of our books.
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I would flip the question on you. When do you think it is appropriate for kids to learn that bad or explicit things exist? When is it important for students to be able to engage with sexual content or profanity in a mature way? Should that be something that happens under guidance, or should we pretend it doesn't exist until they hit college?
8th grade is not too early for kids to engage with disturbing material in a system where they are warned in advance what they are going to encounter and if additional safeguards are being taken to make that material less offensive to them.
Additionally, I would push back on the notion that this is just about censoring specific profanities. The book being taught is a censored version of the book, and the criticism is about censoring at broader levels:
> Steven Brady- We implemented that, we chose to do redactions.
> Rob Shamblin- So can we take it, as far as it needs to go, because I don’t know that it is going to end with one book. I think the process needs to include a bigger plan to holistically redact things that we don’t want in there. We hope we have good employees, like minded culture, centric folks that fit with McMinn County, that they’re going to make the right discretionary decisions to redact that literature in an appropriate way for the age related presentation.
> Steven Brady- After discussing with Mr. Parkison, we felt that was best for our community like you were saying.
> Rob Shamblin- My question goes further, can we redact at a larger level than what I saw there. Why do we have to leave some of that, why can’t we gray all of it?
I don't think the above conversation is about profanity when people are hoping that we have "like minded culture, centric folks" to make these decisions; when they're saying that even a discussion that sex exists is too much for 8th graders to be exposed to. Because it's not too much, you should be teaching kids at that age that sex exists. My feeling is that there isn't really a magical age where teenagers suddenly become mature enough to talk about sex, what happens is that they become mature over time if they are gradually introduced to these topics in structured environments, in safe spaces with parents/teachers, with people who are guiding them through that process in a deliberative way.
And if that never happens, then there is a huge swath of culture that we just can't teach about in schools, which I think would be very harmful to ban.
On one hand, we can debate whether or not kids should be exposed to actual representations of nudity or profanities. But on the other hand, if we're already censoring that content, and giving students the opportunity to opt out and informing the parents, and guiding them through the whole process with teachers and considering context -- if that's not enough, then what we're talking about at that point is that we don't want 8th graders to know that sex exists, and that's just not realistic or helpful. How much culture are we going to pull out of our schools over that? I read to Kill a Mockingbird in middle-school. It is a book that discusses rape. I wasn't traumatized by that, 8th graders are old enough to know that rape as a concept exists. Heck, I read sections of the Iliad and of Shakespeare. Are we saying that 8th graders aren't mature enough to engage with that literature?
The board and parents are complete numbskulls and outraged right-wing patsies.
Then he goes on about an unrelated poem that uses the word ecstasy, and is upset that there's a question that children have to answer about what ecstasy is. He thinks its something to do with children being indoctrinated into vulgarity, sexuality, and inappropriateness.
...lol.
I hate to break HN etiquette but this isn't so much about Holocaust denialism but really dumb people having really dumb hot takes.
It boggles my mind that the depiction of nudity and sexual 'vulgarity' is somehow a greater cause for concern than the depiction of mass murder and dead bodies. Literal piles of corpses are okay but a titty isn't for Mr. Cochran.
I think you nailed it on the head, they are desperate to shelter their children until they turn 18 and head off to college. I hope they don't let their kids near an Internet-connected computer or smartphone, otherwise it's all for show- oh, wait.. doesn't pretty much every kid get a phone in middle school or sooner these days?
The board members are so antiquated and dusty, it's triggering my asthma even from thousands of miles away.
Seriously though, it is sad that how the US public education system curriculum is now basically 100% controlled by the government. When the locals don't like the rules, they find a way around them. Then the rest of us rule-followers suffer through this standardized nonsense.
Teachers in the USA nowadays don't get to decide much about the classes they teach, which certainly kills the unique magic I felt some teachers added to their classes and made for awesome experiences growing up. Sad.
> So, my problem is, it looks like the entire curriculum is developed to normalize sexuality, normalize nudity and normalize vulgar language
EDIT: I read their PDF, this methodology is ridiculous. Their website has the bold claim that "42% of teens have witnessed an antisemitic event", but reading the actual document, that includes hearing about the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting on the news, which basically means that 42% of teens read the news. This isn't the kind of source you should be citing if you want to be taken seriously.
Another instance of that misleading lowpass filter: "if that happened to group J, the J people must have been doing something to deserve it".
I can think of a few opportunists who have latched onto him and dabbled in the cane l culture backlash stuff in the past, but they’re opportunists so of course they’re also hypocrites.
Who do you mean specifically?
[edit] it seems some people disagree. I’d be happy to hear what people think I’m missing, maybe I have the wrong read on this.
The fight against CRT is now a mainstream conservative mission. These are the same people who have spent years advocating for free speech when it comes to tech companies but are fine censoring the schools. It is completely hypocritical.
I guess I’m just not sure which specific people you mean.
Certainly there exist conservatives who hate being censored but love playing censor, that’s nothing new. I’m not sure it’s even hypocritical, they just have values I find to be pretty awful.
Of the people you’ve named below only Paul has any history of arguing for the freedom to say things he doesn’t personally like. The rest just complain when speech they like is curtailed, and they may use the phrase.
I can call a pizza salad, and sing its praises all day, but that doesn’t mean I like salad, or advocate for it.
You’re right that Paul is being hypocritical though.
Most of these people glommed onto the issue after it was made popular with the base by folks like Hawley and Rufo. It’s important to make distinctions when talking about where ideas come from.
Did you read the minutes of the meeting? The content that is against school board policy is enumerated and there is a request to replace the material with something that can teach equivalent lessons.
> I've got enough faith from the Director of Schools down to the newest hire in this building, that you can take that module and rewrite it and make it do the same thing. Our children need to know about the Holocaust, they need to understand that there are several pieces of history, Mr. Bennett, that shows depression or suppression of certain ethnicities. It's not acceptable today. We've got to accept people for who and what they are… But Rob, the wording in this book is in direct conflict of some of our policies… I move that we remove this book from the reading series and challenge our instructional staff to come with an alternative method of teaching the Holocaust.
Believing that it’s more important to protect middle schoolers from mice that say "god damn" than it is to convey the horrors of the camps is white fragility politics in action. Infantilization to serve fascist ends.
1. https://twitter.com/JuddLegum/status/1486732376369631234?s=2...
Did you read the minutes or are you assuming these are just dumb, racist, country-bumpkins? They literally address exactly this point.
From the minutes (regarding removing this book):
> My bigger concern is that this is probably the tip of the iceberg of what is out there.
1) I ask you to refrain from personal attacks if you want me to continue to engage.
2) I feel no moral compunction to read a twenty page supporting document to make a one-line comment about not trusting people's claims uncritically.
3) Having now read that document, my opinion hasn't changed. One person tries a couple of times to address the bigger picture about what problematic books are in the curriculum. In both cases he is almost immediately shut down by the rest of the committee who want to discuss this particular book.
I don't expect you or anyone else on HN to read the supporting text, but I do expect some level of empathy, assumption of good faith, and seeing past sensationalism. Instead I see a lot of cargo culting, demonizing, and propagation of incorrect information.
Having listened to an agonizing number of school board meetings, and having family that is involved in school administration, there are reasons to not let a topic expand past the original scope for the sake of the board, the parents, and everyone else involved.
The right has taken on "free speech" as a cause lately. Big Tech needs to be defunded because Twitter kicked out Trump, etc. It pushes a narrative that the left is against free speech and the right is for it, but as usual, both sides agree they are happy when their tribe wins.
>Regardless of why this decision was made, we’re in a climate where a sustained attack is being made on our schools, our teachers, and the truth. The anti-Critical Race Theory furor ginned up by Republican think tanks for political gain morphed into an excuse for right wing folks to try to cancel diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, and things they don’t agree with in general — and now Conservative book-banning is really having a moment.
Of course I explicitly remember listening to Limbaugh in the 90s or so as he made fun of the “liberal fad” of listening to kids feelings and “protecting them from harm” or having to deal with anything that might be hard or painful. Can’t punish Bobby it might hurt his self esteem.
Isn’t that where the term liberal snowflake came from? That they were so fragile they had to be coddled and couldn’t handle the real world?
And here we are now. What’s good for the goose, I guess.
Well I guess the kids can't see the phrase "god damn" or see a drawing of a naked woman when they are learning about the industrialized murder of millions of people. Do you not see how crazy that is? These these kids aren't eight. They are teenagers. They are old enough to learn about these things. This policy is asinine.
The discussion at the meeting was literally about keeping the same lessons but using a source that didn't contain specific words and images that violated board policy. They weren't trying to censor violence or descriptions thereof.
> Now that I have provided that do you still feel what I said was a "straw man"?
I don't see any concrete examples provided, so yes, I still feel it's a straw man.
>The discussion at the meeting was literally about keeping the same lessons but using a source that didn't contain specific words and images that violated board policy.
Some states and boards have used the exact same method to include language in lessons to say slaves in the South had it better before they got freed and that slavery wasn't always evil. It is a common tactic to downplay events from the past that make people uncomfortable but humanity has shown that we tend to repeat such events so teaching them is important.
>I don't see any concrete examples provided, so yes, I still feel it's a straw man.
You could have asked for examples and I would have provided them but I do find it interesting that you didn't provide examples in your own post, you did exactly what I did and posted your opinion. Holding others to a standard you do not follow yourself isn't a productive way to have a discussion.
I hope you have a pleasant reset of your day.
The board specifically doesn’t want to change the lessons being taught, just the material chosen to teach it because it violates board policies.
Just because a work covers an important topic doesn’t mean it’s appropriate in all contexts, regardless of the quality of that work (e.g. I wouldn’t want my children watching Schindler’s List at their current age, but they should watch it when they are at the appropriate level of maturity).
This will be my last response on this topic but, in the future please review what you have previously written as you appear to have misremembered what you wrote previously.
Sources: Zinn; Loewen
Fancy-sounding principles about government don't matter in this debate. Look at the lack of right-wing outcry over the canceling of Colin Kaepernick. It's just about power, and doing whatever it takes to make sure the "right people" have it.
If you don't think there's a problem with the government banning books from school curriculum for political reasons -- if you don't think that has anything to do with freedom of speech, then I don't see how you have a free speech problem with anything at all. None of the cancel culture that people complain about is illegal or unconstitutional. That doesn't mean it can't be harmful to free expression, but in contrast, "representation with taxation" can actually be unconstitutional if the "representation" people ask for is suppression of political speech.
It is not my job to tell people whether or not they should be concerned with cancel culture. But anyone who is concerned about cancel culture and not concerned with educational book bans, or laws that restrict what topics teachers can talk to students about, or restrictions on conversations about sexual orientations/identities at school or with medical professionals, or any of the other speech laws being floated by Republican governments right now -- that person clearly is not interested in free speech itself, they just have an agenda and are using free speech as a convenient narrative tool in pursuit of that agenda.
People can be legitimately concerned about cancel culture as a free speech issue, but I'm not going to take anyone seriously who says that cancel culture is real and actual government censorship isn't.
It's not banned for political reasons, at least from my reading of it. It's banned for the language and the illustrations of nudity. Nobody is asking for the Holocaust to not be taught in schools, so I fail to see where there is a political bend to this.
Do I think they're being up-tight and prudish? Yes, probably (but I haven't seen the book itself). Do I think it's politically motivated? No. The author of the article even defers that they don't know the motivation: "Regardless of why this decision was made..."
> So can we take it, as far as it needs to go, because I don’t know that it is going to end with one book. I think the process needs to include a bigger plan to holistically redact things that we don’t want in there. We hope we have good employees, like minded culture, centric folks that fit with McMinn County, that they’re going to make the right discretionary decisions to redact that literature in an appropriate way for the age related presentation.
It is very hard for me not to read this as political censorship in nature.
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And second, given the teachers were planning to inform parents and censor the nudity/profanity, it is hard for me not to read this as an objection over students being taught about any subject that borders sex or sexual content. I think the "inappropriate" objection takes on a different tone when people are saying that it's inappropriate to teach literature even after the swear words have been whited out -- at that point we're talking about subject-matter, not profanity.
I view that as both unrealistic in general (I wonder if parents have the same objections to mature topics in To Kill a Mockingbird or Shakespeare), but I also view it as explicitly political. It is a political statement to say that sex as a topic should not ever be mentioned in middleschool.
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But last but not least, even if this were only a discussion about profanity (which I don't think is the case), government censorship of profanity in schools is still a heck of a lot closer to a 1st Amendment violation on the sliding scale of censorship than people ganging up on each other on Twitter is.
I still don't really accept that someone could legitimately find the first to be irrelevant to free speech conversations, but the second to be critically important.
You and I have different views on sexual content being political or not, and that's fine. I can see both sides, but I just don't think it is inherently political.
Wrt 1st Amendment violations, teachers are government employees representing the local government. Saying teachers can't teach something in school as a representative of the government is different than restricting a student's speech.
Eh... there is a lot of history of LGBTQ+ censorship that should be taken into account when making a statement like this. "It's fine for adults but we need to protect the young from it," is historically a very common phrase that has popped up in discussions about sex education and sexual orientation being expressed in schools.
I also want to kind of align the conversation with the specifics of what people objected to in this book. We're talking about 8 swear words and a single cartoon picture of a naked mouse -- all of which were censored from the book. So at this point we are talking about a topic, not specific instances of profanity. We're talking about a view that 8th graders are not mature enough to know that nakedness exists or that sometimes people swear.
I just don't understand how that could be seen as a non-political view. There's a difference between someone saying that 8th graders shouldn't be exposed to the words "bitch" or "damn", and someone saying that 8th graders shouldn't be taught that anyone in any context might use those words.
From the minutes again:
> I understand that on TV and maybe at home these kids hear worse, but we are talking about things that if a student went down the hallway and said this, our disciplinary policy says they can be disciplined, and rightfully so. And we are teaching this and going against policy?
Is the objection that someone in a book did something that was against school policy? Because that seems really political in nature to me as an objection.
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> Saying teachers can't teach something in school as a representative of the government is different than restricting a student's speech.
100% agreed. I don't like what the school is doing here, but I doubt in this case it's a 1st Amendment violation.
However, it's still very clearly closer to a 1st Amendment violation than anything happening on Twitter. Government restrictions on school curriculum can be ruled unconstitutional. Of course not all restrictions are unconstitutional, but it is within the realm of things we would talk about. How kids get taught and what topics teachers can bring up to them is a huge battleground in the fight over the government's ability to define what students are and aren't allowed to learn.
These proposals were so widespread in some GOP circles that they actually became state law in 2 states (Florida and Texas) before being struck down as being a blatantly unconstitutional violation of the first amendment for being compelled speech. Note that in both contexts "struck down" does not refer to a final ruling, but rather an injunction that will remain in place until the final disposition of the case.
https://www.texastribune.org/2021/12/01/texas-social-media-l...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/30/florida...
And the interpretation of the law as "compelling speech" is not just mine alone. The federal judge that issued the preliminary injunction in Florida described it this way:
> The legislation compels providers to host speech that violates their standards—speech they otherwise would not host—and forbids providers from speaking as they otherwise would.
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flnd.37...
Every single person who says YouTube isn't allowed to remove videos is advocating compelled publication.
Every single person who says Facebook isn't allowed to remove anti-vax misinformation is demanding compelled publication.
The list goes on and on. And there are a whole lot of them who claim to be doing it because they're free speech advocates.
> their real complaint is that some community won't let them come in
The "community" is usually a giant multinational corporation like Google, Twitter, Facebook, or Amazon. I'm sure you can find some "free speech advocates" that complain when a neighborhood association denies them a protest permit, or an admin on a small forum bans them, but that's not exactly steel-manning their cause, is it?
*While schools have a legitimate right to decide which books they'll stock in their libraries, this book is both already in their library, and important enough, that the shorthand of calling it a "ban" seems appropriate. They do claim they'll replace it with a book providing equivalent lessons, but that doesn't mean that this book isn't getting banned, just that (taking them at their word) their motives aren't anti-semitic.
Freedom looks simple on paper but remember that we live in a society where everyone has to get along. And screwing with people's childhood sets them back for life. You can never get it back.
A very good test of peoples' sincerity in this territory is to first see how well what they claim of others applies to the speaker themselves. You will frequently find that their accusations serve equally well as admissions of guilt.
"Big tech," consisting of private companies, banning people and content creators from publishing misleading, harmful, calls-to-violence, racist or otherwise untrue information on their platforms
A county School board choosing to reduce the accessibility of a piece of literature that may have been used to educate children about the history of the Holocaust
If the latter is a government run or funded school, I'd say this is wrong. If it is a private school, then I would say it is just stupid, and poor kids for having such ignorant adults in charge of their education.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
I remember some statues being toppled last year by very progressive minded people. Maybe you know destroying art wasn't the progressive thing to do after all.
At least to me, the values of those in favor of keeping southern memorials and banning Maus seem pretty odious.
It is relativism to equate taking down the statues and banning this book, unfortunately.
Are we going to tear out pages in books these same people were mentioned in, to erase any positive memory of them. I don't see how that would be different.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/08...
The book banners started centuries ago. the origins of the word "Bowdlerized" are about cutting unsuitable language from Gibbon's 'decline and fall of the roman empire' [0] Thats 1820s.
"Lambs Tales from Shakespeare" was an earlier instance. They cut all the good bits, to make it suitable for kids. [1]
> I remember some statues being toppled last year by very progressive minded people. Maybe you know destroying art wasn't the progressive thing to do after all.
There really isn't linkage. One is about teaching materials and how to expose young minds to written ideas and expression. The other is about memorialising the past and how its treated. Personally?? I think context panels on the statues to explain why we no longer think they deserve memorialising is better, but thats just my take.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Bowdler [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_Shakespeare
It certainly didn't start last year.
I remember conservatives being grumpy about Dogma and The Simpsons decades ago, and that's hardly the start either. Hell, Socrates got "canceled".
https://core-docs.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/asset/uploaded_...
This has nothing to do with ideology, the story or the meaning of the book. It's just a bunch of educators and parents quibbling over how much swearing in a book for 8th graders is too much, the message that sends, etc, etc. If anything the in depth quibbling and discussion of potential replacement books makes these people look more competent because it's clear that they're considering it from many angles.
I disagree with them and think they care way to much about something that doesn't matter but the point here is that the article's description and most of the comments around here seem far less than honest when compared to the minutes.
This is a bunch of self important educators banning a book over stuff that doesn't matter, not a bunch of ideologues banning a book because they don't like the message.
If I’m in a high school, I can only have my high school’s books. If I’m an adult, those books are now dead to me. If the books are instead in a public library, many more can enjoy them (and the funding is better distributed as well).
I certainly remember being in high school and simply going to my public library any time I wanted a book because the selection was infinitely better.
Probably a much bigger issue in rural areas where the school is maybe the only place where any kind book can be accessed by kids.
What? You can still go to the public library.
> If I’m an adult, those books are now dead to me.
You will likely find those same books in the public library.
If the libraries were consolidated into a regional library, everyone in the region gets access to a super library for life. Furthermore, the library would be high quality as a result of many schools funding it.
Also known as anti-meritocracy? When you hire people because of who they are rather than what they can do, you will slowly destroy competence, and quite understandably, a lot of people should be furious about that.