By Margaret Renkl, Photo: Lechatnoir/Getty Images, The New York Times, February 7, 2022
Tennessee school boards, you may have heard, have been busy lately striking long-beloved, award-winning classic literature from their social studies and language arts curriculums. The Williamson County School Board recently took a hard look at more than 30 texts, restricting the use of seven and striking one altogether: “Walk Two Moons,” a Newbery Medal-winning, middle-grade book by Sharon Creech that follows the story of a 13-year-old girl whose mother is missing. According to the group Moms for Liberty, who lodged the formal “reconsideration request” that caused the school board to take up the issue, “Walk Two Moons” is inappropriate for fourth-grade readers because it features “stick figures hanging, cursing and miscarriage, hysterectomy/stillborn and screaming during labor.”
Well, may God save all American children from the knowledge that women in labor are apt to scream.
That ridiculous complaint didn’t get much national play last week because the media was still busy decrying the news from McMinn County, where the school board had just voted unanimously to remove “Maus,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, from its eighth-grade social studies curriculum. In “Maus,” the author Art Spiegelman uses a comic-book format to tell the story of his parents, who survived the Nazi camps. According to a statement, the school board voted to remove the book “because of its unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide.”
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