It was banned from the curriculum.
Saying this isn’t banning is just marketing for the district.
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Here are the minutes from the school board meeting. Read it tell me the board isn’t full of pitiful, fragile egos, deathly afraid of children learning the truth about the world.
Gosh, the world sure is scary, and the holocaust was mean, but do we really have to acknowledge that?
YES
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Better to hide it from them, like we do with sex stuff, because ignoring history and fascists that never causes any problems. /s
[ETA] Reading over that, this decision is even worse, because as the one educator showed, they already did a good deal to deal with what the board considered “objectionable content”… for example, one of the teachers giving the board information on how Maus is incorporated into the curriculum said this:
What we have done in anticipation of any of those concerns, we prepared a parent letter to go home to inform them of this topic we are about to study. We went ahead and took the step to censor that explicit content and we went ahead and made sure that all of our books are stamped “property of MCS” so that if one does come up for some reason, hey look at these words we are teaching in school, no, that’s not one of our books.
And:
I appreciate the stand that you all are taking to assure the public that we care about our kids,and we believe it’s important to teach our students the difference between right and wrong and help them be ethical people with compassion and morals with respect for others. We are not promoting the use of these words, if anything we are promoting that these words are inappropriate and it’s best that we not use them. It’s inappropriate for school, for our conversation here and you may hear that athome, you may see that on tv,but we do not promote that.
Really ya’ll read the whole thing. It’s fucking enraging the twisted reasoning used to get this book out of the curriculum, because of some curse words.
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It’s a slippery slope!
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It also gives some interesting insight into their rather, not just prudish but bizarre views on sex. The poem read below is from '21 … NINETEEN twenty-one, from a musical. Hell, Truman used it as a campaign song! Judy Garland sang it in a movie!
No wonder sex education is such a taboo topic for these folks. The word “ecstasy” is so concerning he calls it vulgarity!
Current CDC stats list Tennessee as the state with the 6th highest rate of teen pregnancy. Good job, TN.
Mike Cochran- It doesn’t matter, it’s in the curriculum, all this stuff keeps popping up. So, I want to read it, you guys can fire me later, I guess.
I’m just wild about Harry, and Harry’s wild about me
The heavenly blisses of his kisses, fill me with ecstasy
He’s sweet just like chocolate candy
Just like honey from the bee
Oh I am just wild about Harry, and he’s just wild about me
One of the discussion questions is define what this word “ecstasy” means. My problem is, all the way through this literature we expose these kids to nakedness, we expose them to vulgarity. You go all the way back to first grade, second grade and they are reading books that have a picture of a naked man riding a bull. It’s not vulgar, it’s something you would see in an art gallery, but it’s unnecessary. So, teachers have gone back and put tape over the guys butts so the kids aren’t exposed to it. So, my problem is, it looks like the entire curriculum is developed to normalize sexuality, normalize nudity and normalize vulgar language. If I was trying to indoctrinate somebody’s kids, this is how I would do it. You put this stuff just enough on the edges, so the parents don’t catch it but the kids, they soak it in. I think we need to relook at the entire curriculum.
(edited to fix the line breaks)
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I was watching a bunch of Bob Saget stuff after his death and found this:
I already knew a lot hasn’t changed since the 90’s but the white supremacy stuff could have been made today.
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You know what they say - I will hand it to Hitler about one thing: He killed Hitler.
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I guess, but after watching that clip, I’d say it’s alarming that I don’t think its portrayal of white supremacists wouldn’t appear that way on corporate TV today. Maybe because they’ve gone too mainstream, and because corporate TV soft pedals its handling of them now. 
Anyway, back on topic, that’s all to say that with that mainstreaming, the portrayal of Nazi horrors in Maus is all that much more needed today.
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Uncle Sam looks suspiciously like Sam Shepard.
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I guess Shel Silverstein’s right out, if they had any of his work to begin with. Same goes for Nat Hentoff (who wrote for Penthouse and for all I know Playboy as well, in addition to writing extensively about the kind of thing McMinn Co. is doing).
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Most mainstream writers of SF and a lot of literary fiction authors during the last half of the 20th century looked at Playboy as the place where you got your first big and well-paid break. It was to authors what the Carson show was to comedians.
Playboy has its problematic aspects, to say the least, but to damn an illustrator or cartoonist or author because they appeared in its pages is ridiculous.
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Yeah, surest way to increase sales and interest in any book is to make a big, public deal of how “evil and inappropriate” it is. Somehow the fascists never seem to understand this. Which is OK with me.
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Spiegelman should send each member of that school board a (kosher) gift basket with a note thanking them for increasing sales of his book and – more importantly – raising awareness of the dangers of fascism and white supremacy.
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And Allman’s whole argument being that 8th grade students won’t be able to tell the difference between it being okay to use a word in a historical depiction of horrific times and it not being okay to say that word rudely to a peer or teacher? Just fuck that guy.
Sounds like they had a pretty good Holocaust unit before this, tbh.
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