Tennessee School Board Bans Holocaust Graphic Novel over ‘Vulgar’ Words, Themes

I read the first edition of Maus when I was in college. It was the first graphic novel I ever recognized as such.

I watched a lot of films about the history of the United States and World War II when I was in high school, but the first-hand accounts of concentration camp life did not make the impact on me that Maus did.

Looking back, it was the first media that I can think of that reimagined a terrible historical fact in a way that I found respectful to the victims.

"We are talking about teaching ethics to our kids, and it starts out with the dad and the son talking about when the dad lost his virginity. It wasn’t explicit but it was in there. You see the naked pictures, you see the razor, the blade where the mom is cutting herself. You see her laying in a pool of her own blood. You have all this stuff in here, again, reading this to myself it was a decent book until the end. I thought the end was stupid to be honest with you. A lot of the cussing had to do with the son cussing out the father, so I don’t really know how that teaches our kids any kind of ethical stuff. It’s just the opposite, instead of treating his father with some kind of respect, he treated his father like he was the victim." [1]

You can tell that these people are so very close to actually understanding how literature can challenge you and force you to grapple with complex ideas and to introspect and reflect, and yet... they just miss it.

[1] https://core-docs.s3.amazonaws.com/documents/asset/uploaded_...

I see little difference between this type of nonsense from a conservative school board and the kind that comes from progressive "woke" school boards when they try to restrict access to books like Huckleberry Fin because, god forbid, as literary products of the late 19th century, they contain the word "negro" and so forth..

Example: https://archive.fo/3W3SZ

We hear that a book is "banned" in the media a lot, but it means a lot of different things.

* Is it a ban on availability? Meaning the school won't make the book available to students (e.g. in a school library).

* Is it a ban on integration into curriculum? Meaning the school has decided that no teacher may require students to read the book as a course requirement.

* Is it a ban on REQUIRED integration into curriculum? Meaning the school has decided that it isn't going to force teachers to require students to read the book, but each individual teacher may still choose to do so at their discretion.

* Is it a ban on possession? Meaning if you bring the book into school, it will be confiscated.

And then, of course, there are further distinctions.

A particular book might be appropriate for some mature AP English students who are preparing to enter college in the fall, but inappropriate for most middle schoolers. So let's say you have a school that's grades 7-12, with a shared library. Does the librarian determine appropriateness based on whether it's inappropriate for none/some/most/all?

I'm an author of several books, and I tend to be against outright bans. That said, I'm the parent of a 12-year-old who reads at a mid-high-school level, but has the emotional maturity of a kindergartener, and I can absolutely understand where parents are coming from when they hear about books being integrated into curricula that they know their kids don't have the maturity to handle.

A school curriculum is fundamentally selective in that the set of books included must be very small compared to the whole of books. It doesn’t seem a tragedy to exclude this work from the curriculum while still allowing families that want to read it to read it.

A bit meta but it’s weird that someone getting banned from Twitter or similar gets hundreds of free speech comments frothing yet this get equivocation.

As far as I can tell, the board didn't exactly ban the book as much as they opted to remove it from the mandatory curriculum for middle schoolers. And mostly over trivial things like bad language and mentions of sex. I have a copy of Maus in my house and haven't asked my middle school daughter to read it yet because it's a lot to handle.