What a couple of weeks: McMinn County in the national and international news because the county school board banned a book at a called meeting on Jan. 10. And it wasn’t just any book; it was a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel/memoir about the Holocaust. Unfortunately, news about the McMinn County Board of Education’s unanimous decision broke the day before Holocaust Remembrance Day, Jan. 27. Didn’t look good.
The book is “Maus,” the author Art Spiegelman. I’ve had copies of “Maus” for years, used them when I taught my graduate and undergraduate classes in young adult and children’s literature. So I read the board meeting transcript several times with care.
I sense three strands of response in play.
First is the concept of language taboo; second is the concept of the purity of children; third is the cultural dissonance of reader/non-reader, of educated/non-educated (by that I mean someone can earn a diploma, a degree and still not have been educated to think critically, analytically). That is the thought world of the Board of Education and by extension some of our citizens. But not all.
Secondly there is the professional world of the schools: our teachers, administrators but also the hierarchy of state authority in which they fit. That institutional realm intersects with the greater thought world of education: social, philosophical, historical, and yes, political.