A school district in Tennessee has banned teaching a graphic novel (That's a fancy term for a really long comic book.) named Maus. Maus is a take on the Holocaust, retelling the story with the Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. The school board states that they banned it because of nudity and bad language.
For the record, I have purchased (and never got around to reading) a copy of the book for myself that I lost in the move when I got divorced and have gifted another copy to my oldest daughter. I also have a BA in History and my senior thesis/capstone paper was written on the involvement of the Heer, the German Army (not to be confused with the Wehrmacht which was the Nazi equivalent to the Department of Defense) in the Holocaust. I have read everything from translations of primary sources in the form of German After Action Reports to transcripts of the Nuremberg Trials to Ordinary Men to various writings of Omer Bartov...
The list goes on.
Then add to that the fact that, at least according to my father I have some Jewish ancestry (meaning that I am in some way related to every one if the oeople who died in those camps or from the mass shootings), and well...
You'd be hard pressed to find a person who believes more strongly in the importance of Holocaust education than me. I mean that sincerely.
Boobies and bad language happen in the real world and, honestly, you can't accurately recount some events without the atmosphere of profanity and exploitation that those elements add.
And yet...
I'm not a big fan of using things like comic books/Hollywood movies as educational aids to begin with. The amount of historical inaccuracies that creep into one of these works is unreal. I seriously (and I KID YOU NOT) took a course in Japanese history in college in which we read a scholarly paper detailing the historical inaccuracies in The Last Samurai. If I recall correctly, and I may not since it's been awhile, it spanned somewhere in the twenty-five to thirty page range.
If you've seen Glory, you know that the Fifty Fourth Massachusetts Regiment was not issued uniforms when they first arrived. Of course, what you know is wrong. The Fifty- Fourth most certainly did suffer from racism and discrimination. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or an idiot (possibly both if they think you're dumb enough to believe them) but they got their uniforms. Now, the scene where they're paid a smaller wage and therefore refuse to accept payment is one hundred percent true. It's complicated. We were shown Glory in high school. We all took the work to be one hundred percent accurate. I mean, our teacher showed it to us, right? Except that it wasn't and that has altered our perception of history.
As another example, there was the movie The Tuskegee Airmen. In that movie, we see two senators arguing about the existence of a flight program for black men in the military. The senator from New York (I think, it's been awhile) is in favor of the program. His southern counterpart is not. The debate was real. The two senators depicted in the movie are not. And yes, Eleanor Roosevelt really did fly with one of the Tuskegee Airmen shortly before they deployed to Europe, so that part is real. It gets complicated. The Tuskegee Airmen came out after I graduated from high school, so I'm not sure if it was ever used in a classroom or not. I can only say, that despite viewing the movie so many times that the VHS tape I purchased it on fell apart and was eaten by my VCR, I never saw it in a classroom.
Please, if you value your life don't even mention the phrases "historical accuracy" and "John Wayne movie" in front of a college professor. Since I value mine, DEFINITELY don't mention it if I'm standing between the two of you. If and when I see a real fact in a work featuring John Wayne, I promise to inform you of its existence. Given the fact that my father and grandfather (on my Mom's side) were both John Wayne fanatics I've seen a lot but I'm not able to name one movie that got anything right. Actually, that's not technically true. There really were Green Berets in Vietnam. Granted, they called THEMSELVES, US Army Special Forces...
Anyway...
I cannot comment on the historical accuracy and inaccuracies in Maus because I haven't read it other than the obvious. Jews and Nazis were both human beings and not animals. I'm willing to bet that there are a lot more than inaccuracies than just that and I'm pretty sure your average junior high school student is smart enough to know that. And yes, I am aware that Art Spiegelman, author of Maus, based his work on interviews with his grandfather. That doesn't make them one hundred percent copies though, and I'm not sure I trust this book to get it right.
The Left, of course, is screaming racism because that is what the left does. The problem with the Left and their Critical Social Theory (which encompasses Critical Race theory but also things like the LGBT and Feminist movements) is that they refuse to consider causes outside of race, gender, orientation, etc. When they refuse to consider causes outside of those bounds then everything is going to come up either -ist or -phobic. That's just life. Considering whether nudity and profanity are proper fare for a junior high audience would never have crossed their mind because they are blind to even understanding the argument, let alone evaluating it.
So, while I believe in Freedom of Speech and the Press, I don't believe that a persons right to say or right something entitles them to have their works used as a teaching aid. We wouldn't use a movie stating that there is no need to balance equations in either an algebra or chemistry class because of Freedom of Speech. And so, what I'm actually saying here is that I'm not sure Maus was the correct book to be teaching to kids anyway. It should've been left in the library for a curious student to find if they went looking later. It was, after all, watching John Wayne movies with all their inaccuracies that led me to love history in the first place. There are factual works that could have been used to teach the Holocaust Unit. So, for my money, I'd prefer that Maus and other works of historical fiction be kept out of classrooms, even if I have praised them previously.
Maus
Art Spiegelman
Pantheon, 1986
Maus and related works are available for purchase at the links below. If you click the links and buy literally anything from Amazon I get a small percentage at no additional cost to you.
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