A Tennessee school board’s decision to remove the graphic novel Maus from the curriculum has sparked international condemnation. But the incident has its roots in the state’s efforts to improve school curricula—and controversies like this one shouldn’t be allowed to prevent that.
Since news broke that the school board in rural McMinn County had removed Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work from its eighth-grade English curriculum, commentators have slammed board members as bigots, linking their action to the recent wave of parent protests against books with racial themes and state laws against teaching “critical race theory.”
“There’s only one kind of people who would vote to ban Maus, whatever they are calling themselves these days,” prize-winning author Neil Gaiman wrote in a tweet that has gotten over 170,000 “likes.” Spiegelman himself has gone from implying that the board members are “Nazis” to seeing the ban as part of a broader effort to limit “what people can learn, what they can … think about.”
But it’s clear from school board meeting minutes and a later statement that board members aren’t opposed to teaching kids about the Holocaust. Educators “have an obligation to ensure younger generations learn of the Holocaust’s horrors,” the statement said. The topic has long been part of McMinn County’s ninth-grade social studies curriculum.
The objections focused more on eight “rough” words—on the order of “damn” and “bitch”—and a small depiction of a naked woman (rendered, like all the Jewish characters in the book, as a mouse). But they went beyond that. Board members were also concerned, for example, that the nude mouse, representing Spiegelman’s mother, was depicted lying in a pool of her own blood after committing suicide. “We don’t need this stuff to teach kids history,” one board member said.
I’m not defending the board’s decision. If I were a school board member—or an eighth-grade parent or teacher—I would support teaching Maus. But when you live in a country with deep cultural divides, it’s important to try to understand those who don’t share your perspective rather than just scorning or mocking them. And if we care about educating American students—for their sake and ours—it’s important to understand the context in which these clashes arise.
Tennessee is one of a handful of states—most of them politically conservative—that are trying to radically improve the sad state of literacy instruction. That has meant a couple of different things. One is ensuring that teachers get the kind of training in foundational skills like phonics that they should get before they enter the classroom but rarely do. Mississippi has led the way, but Tennessee has recently jumped on the bandwagon. (I’ll be writing more about Tennessee’s efforts in that area soon.)
Equally crucial is the way schools have taught reading comprehension. Most literacy curricula have been organized around supposed comprehension skills like “finding the main idea.” Teachers are guided to focus on having students master the skills, with the content is treated as secondary. Students practice the same round of skills year after year, usually on a random assortment of books or excerpts that are easy enough for them to read independently.
The problem with that approach, as Tennessee and other states have recognized, is that most students never get a chance to acquire the academic knowledge and vocabulary that would enable them to understand more complex texts. In the last few years, several literacy curricula have been developed that try to systematically build that knowledge and vocabulary, beginning in the early grades, by diving deeply into topics in history and science as well as literature.
No state requires its school districts to use a specific curriculum, but some issue a list of “approved” options that districts can choose from. That’s what Tennessee did, selecting curricula that met certain criteria, including building knowledge. And that’s how Maus ended up coming to McMinn County: a committee of local educators chose a state-approved curriculum called EL Education, which uses the novel as the centerpiece of a module on the Holocaust.
To illustrate the benefits of a knowledge-building approach, instructional supervisor Steven Brady showed board members a paragraph on cow nutrition that was full of technical terms like “fermentable carbohydrates” and “salivary buffering.” While his father—presumably a dairyman—would have no trouble understanding that paragraph, Brady said, he didn’t “have a clue” what it meant.
“What we’re finding,” he continued, “is that students can’t have rigorous learning on topics they know little to nothing about. When we jump from one topic to the next, all our time is spent just figuring out words and what they meant. … So, the way curriculums are designed now, is that we build background knowledge, center it around some kind of engaging topic that’s worthy of our time, so that students can then move on beyond just figuring out what vocabulary is.”
That explanation was echoed by an anonymous ninth-grade teacher who raised her hand. Before, she said, the focus was on “okay what [is] the main idea and then we moved on and okay what does this word mean, it was very disconnected.” Now, she said, “we are able to dig deep” and look at a topic “in layered ways.” She also said she loved teaching the Holocaust. But, she said, Maus “is not a book I would teach my students.”
It's not clear board members fully grasped the problem. After Brady presented the paragraph on cow nutrition, one member commented that “not one time do I see a vulgar word” in it. Surely, he said, district officials can take the Holocaust module “and rewrite it and make it do the same thing.”
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. The whole two-month module is built around Maus and the idea of graphic novels, with lesson plans and discussion questions. Writing curriculum is a complex task that most administrators and teachers haven’t been trained to do. Most likely, the school system will just skip the Holocaust module.
A basic problem is that most literacy curricula are written by people who, like me, feel that a book like Maus is perfectly appropriate for eighth-graders. Educators tend to skew left, culturally and politically, and the EL curriculum in particular has a reputation for being oriented toward “social justice.” Many of us on the coasts and the cities find attitudes like those expressed by McMinn’s school board alien and puzzling.
But that shouldn’t prevent us from recognizing that all children, including those in McMinn, deserve a meaningful education. If our schools fail to provide the knowledge and vocabulary that enable people to understand a newspaper and follow current events—as has been the case for far too long—all of us living in a democracy will suffer. And there are different ways to provide that knowledge. Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir Night, for example, is often assigned in schools and doesn’t include the language or graphic images that board members found troubling.
Judging from the minutes, the McMinn school board is planning to review and excise more texts from the EL curriculum, possibly leaving teachers without the guidance they need to be effective. Other choices on the state’s approved curriculum list might have worked better: for example, Guidebooks, a curriculum developed by Louisiana, a state that was in the vanguard in this area and one where cultural attitudes are similar to those in Tennessee. Perhaps in the future, in Tennessee and other conservative states shifting towards knowledge-building curricula—like Texas—state departments of education can help guide districts to choose approved curricula that align better with their values.
Not all protests against books and curriculum are the same. Some—like those launched by a group called Moms for Liberty, which is active in seven counties in Tennessee—seem to be orchestrated to score political points, raising objections that make little sense. The Williamson County chapter recently challenged 31 books that are part of another knowledge-building literacy curriculum, Wit & Wisdom. They included widely read novels like Hatchet, which has been read in fourth-grade classes in the county for decades, and a book for first-graders about sea horses. A review committee ended up banning the highly regarded Walk Two Moons.
But Moms for Liberty doesn’t have a chapter in McMinn County—at least, not yet. The complaints there seem to be sincere and home-grown. Demonizing those who raise them is unlikely to result in anything but more political polarization—and perhaps a return to teaching approaches that simply don’t work.
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