The Tennessee flap over Maus has burned up a lot of space. Is it really worth all that fuss.
Even though the McMinn County School Board members themselves talked about "banning" the book, but what they actually did was remove it from the curriculum. It will not be part of the officially adopted ELA reading work for eighth grade in the district. Nobody has said anything about removing it from the school library. The actual motion that was passed was "we remove this book from the reading series and challenges our instructional staff to come up with an alternative method of teaching The Holocaust."
Maus hasn't made the ALA list of challenged books in three decades. It's a prizewinning stunning modern work of literature, and there's very little in it to be offended by, which makes it an attractive choice for school programs. (Though decades ago a Polish friend complained to me about the portrayal of Poles as pigs in the work.) Except in this one district.
On any given day, you can find a school board somewhere in this country doing something dumb. And there was a lot of dumb in the room. Reading the transcript of the board meeting, you will find panic over the lascivious lyrics of "I'm Just Wild About Harry," a surprise Broadway hit song of 1921, plus a lot of uncertainty about copyright law and a serious concern about words that students, they acknowledge, might very well hear outside of school or on the tv, but wouldn't be tolerated in school itself. Also, Art Speigelman used to draw cartoons for Playboy, so, you know...
If you don't want to read the full transcript, you can get a good summary here at Mother Jones. What David Corn's summary doesn't fully capture is how the educators tried to calmly and reasonably explain the presence of the book in the curriculum, and how completely Not Heard they were by the board. It certainly was not the first time professional educators were ignored and disrespected by their board, but it's always frustrating when it happens. Nor does most of the coverage capture that this board, while stubborn and a bit thick, were not hell bent for leather to do ditch Maus; at one point in the meeting they even tabled the motion.
It sucks to have your board override your professional judgment, particularly for prudish, rather than educational, reasons. And if these guys think the exceedingly tame Maus is problematic, just wait till someone explains the dirty parts of Shakespeare to them. But I suspect that this story would have been a strictly local issue if book banning weren't having a moment right now.
Book banning sucks and is stupid and on top of that doesn't even accomplish what banners want to accomplish. But reconfiguring the reading list for a curriculum happens regularly, often as works are reconsidered for appropriateness and current standards. Schools across the country have reconsidered To Kill A Mockingbird and English teachers are always painfully aware that for every book they do teach, there are ten other worthy books out there--and they occasionally decide to do something about it. This stuff happens, but forbidding teachers to use a certain text in their classroom (without actually listening to their explanation for using it) is tying their hands and professionally insulting. But until you're taking all the copies out of the school library or throwing them on a big bonfire, it's not a ban.
In the end, I don't think McMinn County and Maus are actually a national new story (I'm aware of the irony in my devoting a post to them here). They don't appear to mark the start of a trend nor do their actions seem informed by any of the current agitating groups. It's a bad decision, even an insulting one for their faculty, but it's a local one. As attempts to ban books and gag teachers go these days, this is small potatoes, and most notable for getting a lot of people to read one of the modern classics that everyone should read, including all the Tennessee children now being showered with free copies of the work--which in McMinn County, unfortunately, they'll be left to negotiate without the insights and support of their teachers.
Which is perhaps the weirdest message to come out of McMinn-- "This book has naughty words and disquieting images while discussing a hugely important and terrible time in human history, so we feel that students should definitely not have the support and assistance of a trained educator while they're sorting it out." Good luck to the folks in McMinn County.
to me it is an example when you have to go before the board and defend your curriculum. Teaching in the 1960s in junior high , we had curriculum goals and teachers discussed the selection in department meetings. I was teaching in an affluent school at the time and we would buy the curriculum guides/framworks for ELA from the neighboring districts that we knew to have good academic standards (they were inexpensive -- mainly the cost of reproducing).... I was never called before the school committee to have to "defend" the selections. We also had a unit/module of "controlled sources" for 8th grade where we introduced students to materials for use in history /social studies when writing a paper... it was prepared by the teachers -- it was better than the current free-for-all of "anything that you find first by googling." Mulkiteo County in WA state where my niece teaches is going through something like the McMinn situation. There have always been "reading wars" and the discussion of what should be the "canon" and what we should call the humanities modules and programs in secondary ed. Having to go before a school committee to let the parents micro-manage? that is the new part that seems to be politically motivated by extremists. You can read about censorship in Rick Perlstein's book Nixonland and other histories of extreme views entering into curriculum through the "political" doors of activists pushing a conservative agenda.
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