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Comment by bumbledraven | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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