Planet Word is located in the DMV \u2014 that\u2019s the junction of the District of Columbia, Maryland, and Virginia \u2014 so we need to track what\u2019s happening around us in order to be a relevant part of the local community. Most of our visitors in these pandemic times have come from those three close-by areas, but the DMV will probably always be our biggest source of visitors, pandemic or not.<\/p>\n
So it pains me that for the second time in not too many weeks, I feel disturbed by news from neighboring Virginia.\u00a0 A few weeks ago, I was concerned about efforts to ban books and, even worse, loose talk about burning<\/em> books in Virginia\u2019s Spotsylvania County \u2014 then I was relieved when the school board there seemed to have given up the banning efforts with better sense prevailing.<\/p>\n But this week I\u2019m alarmed anew.\u00a0 First, the superintendent, who opposed the efforts to ban books in Spotsylvania County, was fired by a school board that now has a majority supporting the book-banning proponents.<\/p>\n And now, in another challenge to freedom to read (or more broadly, freedom of speech), Virginia\u2019s newly elected governor, Glenn Youngkin, has called for parents to have more say in classroom curriculum. That fairly innocuous stance played an important role in his victory last November.<\/p>\n But now he\u2019s gone beyond that reasonable position, creating a tip line for parents, or any interested party, to report instances of teachers using \u201cdivisive practices\u201d in their classrooms, a dog whistle for mentioning the much-misunderstood and maligned Critical Race Theory or teaching about LGBTQ issues or assigning books that portray sex or print objectionable language.<\/p>\n Parents should have a say in their children\u2019s education, to be sure, but curtailing teachers\u2019 freedom to decide what\u2019s best for their students can quickly lead to avoiding teaching about uncomfortable, challenging, or controversial ideas. It can mean narrowing students\u2019 windows on the world and their ability to make informed choices.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s what we should be doing with a tip line: encouraging people to report instances of fine teaching. And indeed that\u2019s how many Virginia parents responded when the tip-line proposal came out. They started reporting instances of caring teachers, of excellent teachers, instead of reporting teachers who recommended reading that might make students uncomfortable.<\/p>\n So when a school district in Tennessee banned the Pulitzer-prize-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, Maus<\/em>, because it has \u201csome rough, objectionable language\u201d and depicts a \u201cnaked character,\u201d as reported in the New York Times (Jan. 29, 2022), I could only applaud when the author, Art Spiegelman, said, \u201c\u2018This is disturbing imagery. But you know, what? It\u2019s disturbing history.\u2019\u201d He went on to say that \u201che got the impression that the board members were asking, \u2018Why can\u2019t they teach a nicer Holocaust?\u2019\u201d (And, really, isn\u2019t one of our most indelible memories from the Holocaust those images of naked prisoners being forced to disrobe for \u201cshowers\u201d that ended up being gas chambers?\u00a0 Isn\u2019t the horror of those images what makes us vow, Never Again?)<\/p>\n The Times reported that Rep. Steve Cohen, the state\u2019s first Jewish congressman, said \u201ccensoring books about the Holocaust, or about slavery and lynching or other atrocities, was a way to purge one\u2019s understanding of the horrors of what humanity is capable of.\u201d<\/p>\n This episode reminded me of when I taught 5th<\/sup> grade in Montgomery County. As part of the curriculum, the class read Number the Stars<\/em>, a Newbery Award winner by Lois Lowry about the daring rescue of Danish Jews during WWII. I was surprised when the mother of one of my students, they were 10 or 11 years old at the time, told me she had never told her daughter about the Holocaust, so her daughter was shaken by the book. But isn\u2019t that why reading such a fictionalized historical account in school might be the best setting for learning about something so upsetting \u2014 so you can discuss it with your teacher and fellow students?<\/p>\n