They’re like a bunch of Daleks, “Inappropriate! Inappropriate!”
You know, I don’t think it’s the book that’s inappropriate here.
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Does the MAGA crowd prefer that kids learn everything they know about sex from news stories about GOP politicians?
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Within 24 hours, we should see a fundraiser to provide a local bookshop with free copies for every student who asks. Fingers crossed.
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I too have done a double take from KFDM stories.
I mean, 8th graders SHOULD know the basic parts of anatomy, but many don’t (including much older people). Frank’s misconceptions are completely age appropriate and probably would be both relatable and informative. It’s also a few lines of the book and this pearl clutching shouldn’t overshadow the over all message.
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I read this book when I was in the 8th grade (more or less). It was a formative book for me and it was for many kids that age. I read it to my daughter when she was a little bit younger and she was struck by it too. It’s hard to read it and not get emotional. To be fair, though, there are tedious parts, so I wouldn’t fault anyone for reading a graphic novel or an edited version of the book.
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Just wait til these assholes find out women actually have a clitoris!
(not that there’s a danger of that happening any time soon)
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I remember reading this book when I was a pre-teen. I found it a little boring, after all it was a diary with very personal impressions about everyday life. Of course, spending the day hiding in a building, keeping quiet so as not to be found by the Nazis is not something very dynamic. What really upset me was realizing that she didn’t return home and died in a filthy concentration camp, alone, without family, friends and perhaps no one to hold her hand.
I think the message of the book can be summed up as “she didn’t come home.”
If this doesn’t leave any parent with children the same age shaken, I think they have to stop and think a little about life and the world.
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Nazis killed thousands of children, did unspeakable “scientific” experiments on them and that doesn’t seem to bother anyone anymore nowadays.
I remember a documentary I saw on TV “centuries” ago, it was about the Holocaust and other groups of “undesirable” people that were targeted by the Nazis. One of the scenes showed a boarding school for gypsy children. I think those children and teenagers were Roma people. The Nazis filmed them playing, making funny faces for the camera. There was no sound, but you could notice that the cameraman or the director or another member of the film crew was making some jokes. The children laughed, the more extroverted ones danced and the shy ones hid behind the skirts of the older ones. In the end, the narrator reported that they were all killed. 130 boys and girls disappeared and if it weren’t for that grotesque film, no one would remember them.
Each parent has the right to educate their child as they wish. But not to be outraged by these crimes and others like Aktion T4, well, I don’t understand. If they said the book is a little dark and grim for kids, that they must wait a little more to be exposed to what happened in WWII, that I can understand.
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It still amazes me that, growing up in Pennsyltucky in the late 70s and early 80s, we had legitimate health class in 8th grade, including sex ed. Granted, it was taught by a perpetually embarrassed and red faced gym teacher, and although we got detailed pictures of anatomy, they were for coloring (with crayons). But they tried! Sure, we still had a bunch of teen pregnancies anyway, but they tried!
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The so-called offensive passage read to the young teenagers, according to Chron, was about Frank’s observations of male and female anatomy, a huge no-no in MAGAland
For a long time, Otto Frank himself kept passages like this out of the published version of the diary. It’s only in recent editions that the parts that made him uncomfortable were restored to provide a more accurate portrait of his daughter.
In any case, the real objection right-wingers have to teaching the diary has more to do with matters of ideology. They don’t want fascism and state-sanctioned bigotry to be seen in a bad light.
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somehow, anne frank’s diary falling out of favour during the rise of fascism seems entirely on-brand
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I think it’s several things at play… one is that what happened in the holocaust has been highly abstracted in American life. Like the nazis are not people who carried out these kinds of horrific atrocities against other people. Many people just have an… artificial view of it, like it’s the ancient past, and not something that happened within some people’s life times (though the people who lived through it are further and fewer). It doesn’t help that Americans are often taught to see the war via the lense of our “heroic” rescue of Europe (another distortion about the war), rather than the more complicated picture of the war, which highlights the contributions of a number of people (especially the Soviet Union). They don’t see the connection between the Holocaust and their own lives or that something like that can happen again, and it can happen anywhere, and in fact it has happened since then. The Holocaust has become so specialized, that some get angry when you compare it to other atrocities that might bring it home to them…
But I think that’s a common way to understand the past for many Americans, as a series of disconnected abstracts that have no impact on their lives. Events in the past that are free from debate and reinterpretation, that lack any contingency, and that they don’t see as making up the present moment in our daily lives… It’s that kind of thing that lead people to do things like ban these kinds of books, because I don’t think most of the people supporting this see themselves as “pro-nazi”… after all, we’ve been taught that the nazis are these cartoonish bad guys, not real people who did awful things. And “we’re” not cartoonish bad guys… they miss that the nazis did not see themselves as cartoonish bad guys either… hence the sort of disconnect…
Does that make any sense?
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Yes. This sort of things You described aren’t restricted to the US. I’ve read an article about a scholar who studied the relationship school and the community in the countryside of Brazil. The author of this study said that the perception of the role of the school has changed over the years. Today, many parents view teachers, school and even education itself with suspicion, because for them, the values taught in class clash with those seen at home and can undermine parental authority.
Of course, many opportunistic people realized this and started targeting the teachers, classifying the classes as indoctrination sessions and the teachers as communist agents. Some politicians have gone so far as to encourage the harassment of education professionals while others have proposed laws to persecute teachers.
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I think there’s also an aspect of disconnect through most white Americans never having had to deal with most aspects of war. The country has never been invaded or bombed from the air, or embargoed or sidelined. There’s been no massacres or conflict-caused famine.
All those things happened to Native Americans and Black slaves, not to the colonists, so it’s far easier to keep a distance and think those things happen to other people, over there.
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Yeah, that’s depressing, just how much of this stuff seems to be globalized…
Yep… not since the civil war, and of course, everyone who lived through that is long dead, as are most of their direct ancestors… And since we view it as such a disconnected event…
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One movie that really gets at the “everyday” aspect of it, in this case it’s not the atrocities of the Holocaust but the post-war surveillance some of my German friends grew up with, is this one.
Highly recommend.
It’s eerily similar to where we are heading, or already are, in several parts of the country.
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To even suggest that Nazis are people choosing to believe evil things and commit evil acts is often seen as downplaying the very evilness of the Nazis. For many Americans the Nazis seem to have been infected with an evil virus, that came from outside and that they had no control over. To think otherwise is to admit that anyone can make that choice, and that idea is just not acceptable.
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if the teacher pivoted from the original approved curriculum or if administrators were aware of the book being part of the class.
If the latter, presumably the administration will restore the teacher and step down voluntarily.
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TED: TIL what a vagina looks like, and my good friends – i was shocked!
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