McMinn County’s Maus Problem

The Weekly Sift

https://www.timesfreepress.com/cartoons/2022/jan/28/maus/5265/

The decision was made January 10, but it didn’t go viral until Thursday, which also happened to be Holocaust Remembrance Day: The Board of Education of McMinn County, Tennessee had voted 10-0 to ban Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer-winning graphic novel Maus, which tells the story of his father’s experiences during the Holocaust.

If you clicked the links and read the longer versions of the story, though, “banned” wasn’t exactly the right word. The county’s 8th-grade reading program for the year had been split into four modules, each with a theme and an “anchor text”. The theme of the third module was the Holocaust, and the anchor text was supposed to be Maus. The kids would spend a quarter of the year discussing Maus while they also read supporting texts that gave them the context to understand what was going on in Maus.

The motion that passed 10-0…

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