I read the first edition of Maus when I was in college. It was the first graphic novel I ever recognized as such.
I watched a lot of films about the history of the United States and World War II when I was in high school, but the first-hand accounts of concentration camp life did not make the impact on me that Maus did.
Looking back, it was the first media that I can think of that reimagined a terrible historical fact in a way that I found respectful to the victims.
"We are talking about teaching ethics to our kids, and it starts out with the dad and the son talking about when the dad lost his virginity. It wasn’t explicit but it was in there. You see the naked pictures, you see the razor, the blade where the mom is cutting herself. You see her laying in a pool of her own blood. You have all this stuff in here, again, reading this to myself it was a decent book until the end. I thought the end was stupid to be honest with you. A lot of the cussing had to do with the son cussing out the father, so I don’t really know how that teaches our kids any kind of ethical stuff. It’s just the opposite, instead of treating his father with some kind of respect, he treated his father like he was the victim." [1]
You can tell that these people are so very close to actually understanding how literature can challenge you and force you to grapple with complex ideas and to introspect and reflect, and yet... they just miss it.
Wow, these are some of the prudiest prudes that I've ever seen. One of them is concerned about the vulgarity of this poem:
"I’m just wild about Harry, and Harry’s wild about me
\ The heavenly blisses of his kisses, fill me with ecstasy
\ He’s sweet just like chocolate candy
\ Just like honey from the bee
\ Oh I am just wild about Harry, and he’s just wild about me"
Upon further inspection I agree with the quoted parent. This novel is not appropriate for middle schoolers, and hiding that fact behind a veneer of “you’re trying to suppress information about the Holocaust” is shameful.
I read Maus in middle school. It gave me an excellent first awareness on difficult topics. It fascinated me and probably gave me a head start on social thinking. Even if I was an outlier, I can't fathom how it could do so much damage to some children that is worthy of robbing other children of its value.
Does that mean you also rally against video games and movies that depict violence? Would watching a documentary about the Holocaust also be a bridge too far? Keep in mind this is the curriculum for eighth-graders.
> hiding that fact behind a veneer of “you’re trying to suppress information about the Holocaust” is shameful.
I think the veneer goes the other way. That is, the parents are banning something that illustrates an important and painful part of real human history under the pretext that it contains bad language and difficult themes. Well yeah, that's the point.
Because middle schoolers don't have to deal with sexuality or suicide or arguments with parents?
We did some 40 years ago when I was in middle school, has this really changed? Or are we just burying our heads in the sand and saying that the internet and such doesn't exist?
I see little difference between this type of nonsense from a conservative school board and the kind that comes from progressive "woke" school boards when they try to restrict access to books like Huckleberry Fin because, god forbid, as literary products of the late 19th century, they contain the word "negro" and so forth..
Actually The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn did contain numerous instances of the full-blown N-word. And that's what drives most of the opposition to featuring it in HS curricula. (I'm not sure if it every used "negro" as such).
Which are unfortunate (these curriculum removals), in my view -- because they blunt the discussion of just how pervasively racist American society was at the time. And in effect, serves to further enshrine and empower the word's status as a weapon and trigger.
We hear that a book is "banned" in the media a lot, but it means a lot of different things.
* Is it a ban on availability? Meaning the school won't make the book available to students (e.g. in a school library).
* Is it a ban on integration into curriculum? Meaning the school has decided that no teacher may require students to read the book as a course requirement.
* Is it a ban on REQUIRED integration into curriculum? Meaning the school has decided that it isn't going to force teachers to require students to read the book, but each individual teacher may still choose to do so at their discretion.
* Is it a ban on possession? Meaning if you bring the book into school, it will be confiscated.
And then, of course, there are further distinctions.
A particular book might be appropriate for some mature AP English students who are preparing to enter college in the fall, but inappropriate for most middle schoolers. So let's say you have a school that's grades 7-12, with a shared library. Does the librarian determine appropriateness based on whether it's inappropriate for none/some/most/all?
I'm an author of several books, and I tend to be against outright bans. That said, I'm the parent of a 12-year-old who reads at a mid-high-school level, but has the emotional maturity of a kindergartener, and I can absolutely understand where parents are coming from when they hear about books being integrated into curricula that they know their kids don't have the maturity to handle.
This and the Alaska issue are the same, they are 'banned' in terms of being removed from the ciricullum. The books are neither removed from the library nor is there any mandate against ownership or possession.
The term 'banned' seems to get more clicks and more emotional reaction.
A school curriculum is fundamentally selective in that the set of books included must be very small compared to the whole of books. It doesn’t seem a tragedy to exclude this work from the curriculum while still allowing families that want to read it to read it.
A bit meta but it’s weird that someone getting banned from Twitter or similar gets hundreds of free speech comments frothing yet this get equivocation.
As far as I can tell, the board didn't exactly ban the book as much as they opted to remove it from the mandatory curriculum for middle schoolers. And mostly over trivial things like bad language and mentions of sex. I have a copy of Maus in my house and haven't asked my middle school daughter to read it yet because it's a lot to handle.
I watched a lot of films about the history of the United States and World War II when I was in high school, but the first-hand accounts of concentration camp life did not make the impact on me that Maus did.
Looking back, it was the first media that I can think of that reimagined a terrible historical fact in a way that I found respectful to the victims.