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Comment by bumbledraven | Hacker News Reader

Stating that Maus was "banned" without qualification is misleading. It gives the impression that the book was removed from the library and that teachers are prohibited from using it as a resource. The author had plenty of space to clarify this in the article and chose not to.

What happened is that the board approved a motion to remove Maus from the list of prescribed materials for the 8th grade unit on the Holocaust. Lord of the Rings isn't on that list either. Neither book has been "banned".

> Prohibiting books from being added to a curriculum is what banning is.

The board didn't "prohibit" anything from being added to the curriculum. They are the ones responsible for the curriculum and they simply removed Maus from it. As noted in the meeting, they could add it back at any time if they choose.

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If a teacher is forbidden from getting copies of a book (even at their own expense), distributing them to students, and assigning reading and giving lessons on the book, then it’s effectively banned. Let’s not play semantics here.

Yes, that would qualify as banning if it happened, but as far as I can tell, neither the article nor the meeting minutes state that McMinn County teachers are forbidden from doing any of those things.

It’s pretty reasonable to infer from the circumstances that such an attempt would immediately get the teacher into big trouble. It would certainly have a chilling effect at the very least.

I think reasonable people can disagree about the extent to which removing a book from the required reading list would have such a chilling effect.

In any event, can we agree that it's misleading to describe what happened simply as "banning" without further qualification? As an example of a more accurate description, I would point to Reason's article on the subject [1]:

> Tennessee School Board Pulls Maus From Eighth-Grade Curriculum

> A grim sign of the bureaucratic mentality controlling public education

[1] https://reason.com/2022/01/27/tennessee-school-board-pulls-m...

I still disagree because my experience with the way schools operate is that “removed from the curriculum” and “banned” amount to the same thing in practice. It’s a distinction without a difference.

I'm baffled there is such obvious hairsplitting on this on HN, of all places, against a notable educational book about the freakin Holocaust. One of my college roommates was assigned this text in a contemporary literature course as it was and is a contemporary historical fiction graphic novel.

Exactly. Banning a book about the Holocaust and saying it's not banning reeks of the appearance of Holocaust denialism, white nationalism, and/or antisemitism.

To avoid difficult, real subjects is to lie to children and make them into ignorant, naive, uneducated adults.

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