Leonard Pitts: We should just let teachers teach

I have a modest proposal.

We’ll get to it in a moment but, first, let’s talk about “Maus.” That, of course, is Art Spiegelman’s two-part graphic novel of his father’s experience in the Holocaust, which was banned last month by the school board in McMinn County, Tennessee.

Sadly, that in itself does not make “Maus” unique. To the contrary, book banners are having a field day ransacking school libraries for texts that violate their conceptions of decency. Everything from Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” to Dav Pilkey’s “Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People” is being consigned to the metaphorical fire. Somewhere, Josef Goebbels is smiling.

But the McMinn County school board’s unanimous decision to pull Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning work still struck me like a rock. You see, “Maus” is one of my favorite books. It’s one of the best things I’ve ever read.

If you’ve read it, you know what I mean. In telling his story, Spiegelman uses animals as stand-ins for humans: the Nazis are cats, the Americans, dogs, the Jews, mice, etc. And if you’re thinking, “Well, that sounds cute” ... it isn’t. Within that deceptively anodyne framework, he erects worlds of emotional dynamism, particularly in exploring his own fraught relationship with a father left indelibly scarred by what he witnessed and endured.

The McMinn school board somehow managed to reduce all of that to “cuss words” and nudity; i.e., cartoon mice without their clothes on. Journalist David Corn of Mother Jones reports that at least one board member admitted to having not even read the book.

Hence, the “modest proposal” we’ll discuss in a sec. Some of you will recognize the reference to a famous 1729 essay by Jonathan Swift, some won’t and a few may remember it vaguely for advocating that people eat the children of the poor, failing to realize (as often happens) that Swift was actually satirizing society’s callousness toward those children. Which raises a question: Given that diversity of comprehension, how would you teach Swift in 2022? Would you even try, knowing how easily it could provoke a visit from some furious parent claiming her child was traumatized?

Not so long ago, Swift was considered required reading for cultural literacy. People who read and thought about literature for a living had reached a consensus that his work, challenging though it was, was important. But nowadays, that consensus is supposed to also include school board members and parents, most of whom, we may safely assume, haven’t read the work.

How are those interests supposed to align? The fact is, they can’t. That’s how you get embarrassments like the one in Tennessee. Small wonder a graph of kids’ test scores looks like a ski slope.

So, here’s my modest proposal: How about we respect educators as the trained professionals they are? How about we trust their judgment? How about we stop requiring them to reach consensus with those who have not the first clue? If a parent feels their child can’t handle some challenging material, fine: empower that parent to opt the child out of the lesson — not to deny the lesson to everyone else.

And voters, vote. Purge school boards of the sort of bluenose martinet who thinks you should teach the Holocaust — the Holocaust! — without painful words and images. If we want to save American education, the first step should be obvious.

Let teachers teach.

Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald. lpitts@miamiherald.com