From The Atlantic
The job of American schools, as enforced by the bureaucracy, is not really education. It’s censorship.
That may sound overly cynical. But I’ve worked as an educational writer and curriculum developer for almost 20 years, and the most important part of the job, it often seems like, is not imparting information, but rather figuring out how to make sure that the students don’t receive any.
On one project, a colleague of mine working on a world history course was told not to include the fact that gay people were targeted during the Holocaust. In another instance, I was told that I could not, for sensitivity reasons, include a test passage about storms at sea. Passages about rats, or alcohol, or love, or death were similarly proscribed. So were passages that depicted, or even mentioned, slavery — and this was for an American history exam. Again, there were sensitivity concerns, though whether we were worried about offending black people or white people, I don’t know. Probably both.
I was not surprised, therefore, to learn that the Chicago Public Schools have recently decided to restrict access to Marjorie Satrapi’s graphic memoir, Persepolis, which deals with her experiences growing up under the fundamentalist regime in Iran. The exact nature of and reason for the ban is still somewhat unclear. There wasinitial speculation that the book was being banned from all school libraries because its negative portrayal of the thuggish fundamentalist Iranian regime was somehow Islamophobic or insensitive to Mulsim students. This story made CPS look, obviously, very bad.
School officials have hurried to explain that they do not actually object to the political content. Instead, they say, the book is still sanctioned for school libraries, but that lower grades may not use it because of “graphic language and images that are not appropriate for general use in the seventh grade curriculum.” High school teachers are still, apparently, allowed to use the book, though only with special training.
