I wonder if slashing a real live cow in halves was a-ok for this woman, though…(that’s the shock scene I remember from Apocalypse Now, never noticed a penis).
N.m. Wrong thread
They didn’t ban the book, they banned the use of the book in the ELA 8th grade curriculum. A curriculum that is in use in many school districts around the country and is considered by many to be a much better approach than simple rote memorization of facts without context. The ELA program that they use is made up of four modules, each around two months long. The first module is “Folklore of Latin America”, the second is “Food Choices”, the third is “Voices of the Holocaust”, which has Maus as its anchor text, and the fourth is “Lessons from Japanese American Internment”, which has some obvious areas of overlap with module three.
I’ll note that this district already had a method for any concerned parent to opt their children out of this curriculum. I’ll also note that this decision was made in spite of very strong, and well-reasoned objections from the people that the district selected to actually pick the curriculum. The minutes of the meeting show that the board itself is made up of a bunch of fucking yokels who hadn’t even bothered to read the damned thing, even though this particular meeting was a special meeting with this book discussion as the sole topic. One of the complaints by the board is that some of Spiegelman’s earlier work was in Playboy. Fuck off, dipshits.
Link to full 8th grade ELA curriculum.
Link to minutes of specially called meeting because some fascist complained about Maus. The minutes are pretty enlightening and, in my opinion, allow the actual idiots to show themselves in this discussion.
Right. I don’t believe their statement. I think it’s window dressing.
It’s the Cover Your Ass statement you come up with after the bad press hits.
In better news, apparently The Complete Maus and its separate Maus Vol 1 and Maus Vol 2 are all on Amazon’s best seller lists now in some capacity:
“The Complete Maus” on Friday held the No. 1 spot among Amazon’s bestsellers in the comics and graphic novels category, the No. 4 spot for literature and No. 5 for biography.
“Maus I” and “Maus II” — earlier published books that are combined in “The Complete Maus” — also shot up to other top spots on Amazon bestseller lists since Wednesday afternoon, when news of the ban first broke.
Also a bit about a local comics shop owner in the area buying copies to make available as loaners to any students who would like to read them.
Somewhat tangential to the thread but, recently, the Chinese government redid the ending of the movie Fight Club, so that everyone went to jail and the government won. Palahniuk, the author of the novel, had the following to say on the topic:
Actually, I though of purchasing a copy but Amazon now says it’s all out of stock.
Ooh, I was hoping someone would dig up and post the link to the minutes, There’s some wild stuff in there, like the board member who complained about the pernicious immorality in song lyrics and brought up “I’m Just Wild About Harry”, a song from 1921.
I own a copy, and this hubbub prompted me to flip through it for the first time in years.
I wouldn’t read Maus to a four-year-old as a bedtime story.
But that’s not what’s being discussed. And what’s being discussed, again, doesn’t seem to be that the parents think 8th grade is too young and maybe it should be 10th grade instead. It seems to be that they want it out of the schools altogether.
heh if I was a history teacher id take all the classes put them in the auditorium and let them watch Schindlers list followed by escape from Sobibor that way the parents would really have something to bitch about
Reading through, I’m reminded of a common complaint I have these days: People are making decisions that affect others without having any idea of what they’re trying to accomplish.
In this case, they’re trying to solve the problem that children are banned from cussing but, at the same time, they’re giving them something with bad words in it. But that’s a problem that only exists when the reason to ban children from cussing is " ".
Maybe there are reasons for the ban? You need to be able to control how you behave and talk, depending on what setting you’re in? You need to learn how to most effectively and poignantly use your language, to carry your message?
In the context of the objectives for banning certain behaviors, there is no conflict between the presence of curse words in a the curriculum and the ban on children using curse words, willy-nilly. That discrepancy is, itself, a part of the education.
Thank you for those links.
As someone who believes that many Middle Schoolers might not yet all have the fund of knowledge or intellectual capacity to fully understand the work, and that other Holocaust themed works might be better suited for that age group in general I now state with high confidence that many adults in that community certainly have neither.
And am convinced that as part of that curriculum eight graders could handle it, even if some of their parents could not.
I see a close link, thanks for the information. I might finally bother to watch it netflix (before the Chinese version takes over the world).
Glad to read that the Streisand-effect is alive and well. If you go to amazon. de or .fr or .es they still have stock. But knowing amazon they will react fast anyway.
Well, there you have the answer to your early question about what is the primary driver.
It is authoritarianism. And it is not happening in a vacuum.
The final days of the Virginia gubernatorial campaign have featured a cameo by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel, “Beloved.” Republican Glenn Youngkin is running an ad bashing Democrat Terry McAuliffe for vetoing legislation in 2017, when McAuliffe was governor, that would have given parents the right to opt their children out of reading sexually explicit material in school. The ad features a mother who says her son, as a high school senior, suffered from night terrors after reading the book.
What you also miss is the element of time, Maus and books like Beloved where published in the 80s, so spare me their declarations that only now they figure out how harmful there are to children. (I guess it would be “harmful” in their view by realizing that education like that is a reason why their monuments to bigotry are tumbling down nowadays, because generations now have learned a “harmful lesson”)
What you see here is (I expected this result months ago) the result of the fake controversy about CRT (and “Parental authority” about wanting their kids not vaccinated or wearing masks in schools) that allowed many right wing pro-censor people to be elected to school boards and districts in recent days.
A governmental agency in the US is unanimously choosing to engage in Holocaust denial (and yes, that’s what they’re doing, even though they claim otherwise. That is absolutely worthy of attention across the country and across the world.
As for the claim that it’s about nude cartoon mice, at the same time that this is going on, prominent Republicans are actually also complaining about a cartoon mouse putting on clothes.
Since this is off topic for this thread, I would love for you to start a new thread in Great Debates and bring cites.
As you said, they claim otherwise. I don’t know how we’d know for sure unless we got to see what (if anything) they replace it with if/when Maus is removed from the curriculum. Unless there’s some evidence in the meeting minutes that @DMC linked to? I didn’t read the whole thing thoroughly. I read enough to know that there’s some form(s) of idiocy involved, but not that particular form of idiocy.
These are the people who call us “snowflakes”… 
How many legs does a cow have if the McMinn County school board claims that a tail is a leg?