Tennessee School Board Pulls Maus From Eighth-Grade CurriculumA grim sign of the bureaucratic mentality controlling public education
By Brian Doherty
January 27, 2022
Art Spiegelman's once-controversial and now-canonical graphic memoir Maus has been removed from the McMinn County, Tennessee, school curriculum in a unanimous decision by the local Board of Education.
It was an unexpected irony for the news to hit this week, today being Holocaust Remembrance Day. Spiegelman's Pulitzer-winning book, with its enormous cultural impact and reader-friendliness, has been a, perhaps the, primary pop vehicle of such remembrance over the past few decades. Spiegelman's mother and father were both Auschwitz survivors, and Maus portrays him learning his parents' Holocaust experiences and retelling them—in a riff on classic animal-comics tropes—with Jews as mice and Nazis as cats.
The way McMinn County officials thought through the matter, as revealed by the minutes of their meeting, says a lot about how the public schools deal with serious matters of history and art.
The book was being taught to eighth graders as part of a unit on the Holocaust. A few people attending the meeting objected to the book's "rough, objectionable language," and they initially wanted to redact "eight curse words" and one graphic image. The complaints expanded from there, with board member Tony Allman seeming to believe that the horrors of the Holocaust should not be taught to schoolchildren in general. "Being in the schools, educators and stuff we don't need to enable or somewhat promote this stuff. It shows people hanging, it shows them killing kids, why does the educational system promote this kind of stuff, it is not wise or healthy," he opined in the halls of the McMinn County Center for Educational Excellence.
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Source:
https://reason.com/2022/01/27/tennessee-school-board-pulls-maus-from-eighth-grade-curriculum/
