In an impressive expansion of the term “pornographic,” a Northville, Michigan woman, Gail Horalek asked that Anne Frank: The Diary Of A Young Girl (The Definitive Edition) be removed from the school’s curriculum because: “It’s pretty graphic, and it’s pretty pornographic for seventh-grade boys and girls to be reading. It’s inappropriate for a teacher to be giving this material out to the kids when its really the parents’ job to give the students this information.” The passages that she’s dubbed “pornographic” are actually more anatomical, given that they discuss Frank attempting to learn more about her own body, than they are “designed to arouse lust,” the conventional meaning of pornographic.

But rather than quibble over the definition, in rendering a verdict on Horalek’s complaint, Robert Behnke, the assistant superintendent for Instructional Services in Northville, stood by the inclusion of the edition of the book in the seventh-grade curriculum on the grounds of its relevance to the unit on courage in which it was taught. And he reminded Horalek that existing school regulations mean she can get pretty much what she wanted. The full email he sent to parents, posted by one of them on a message board, reminds the community:

The committee also suggested the district take steps to further communicate information about the units of study within the middle school literature courses, and where possible, provide booklists to parents with the notation that reading selections can always be reviewed by parents prior to making a literature selection. As always, in the event that a concern surfaces during a unit and is brought to the teacher’s attention, adjustments can be made to move the student to another literature selection and/or an alternative assignments can be discussed.

A communication regarding the seventh grade English Language Arts units of study and booklists is being created and will be shared with parents in the near future. Communication on units of study and booklists from other grades also will be forthcoming.

At Northville Public Schools we are proud of the partnerships we have forged with parents in the best interest of all students. Keeping in mind that families within the Northville community have varying perspectives, and that our students have varying levels of sensitivity and maturity — which are often best accommodated by their parents — the district strives to provide choices for parents and students where appropriate and possible when it comes to programming and courses. As a school district, we also encourage parents to use supplemental learning activities and books that reflect their own family’s values and perspectives to support reading and literature analysis taking place in the classroom.

If Horalek wants to be the person responsible for introducing her daughter to issues of sexuality, the Northville Public Schools give her every right to do so. If she’d Googled the book when her daughter’s syllabus came out, she would have found references to the removal of the Definitive Edition from the curriculum in the Culpeper County, Virginia school system on some of the same grounds she complained about. If she’d searched the text of the diary on either Google Books or through Amazon, she would have seen the passages that made her uncomfortable before her daughter even started reading the book. Maybe Horalek couldn’t have predicted what might have made her daughter uncomfortable in a classroom setting, but if she thinks there are certain subjects that should be reserved for parental instruction, there were any number of ways Horalek could have checked the book to see if it threw up red flags for her.

I’m not opposed to the idea that parents should play a role in their children’s education, or that parents have some sense of what makes their children comfortable or uncomfortable—though I don’t think that knowledge is complete. But it seems to serve the interests of the most people to give those parents and those children appropriate exits from the mainstream curriculum, and resources to help them supplement the curriculum they want to opt out of.

Over the past couple of days, a kerfuffle’s been unfolding in the Chicago Public Schools after the administration announced that Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel memoir Persepolis would be removed from seventh-grade classrooms, due to concerns about the language and content, apparently in particular, the book’s portrayal of torture during the Iranian Revolution. It’s not clear to me that a specific parent complaint prompted the book’s being pulled from the curriculum, but it’s still a disappointing decision, given how wonderfully attuned Persepolis is to the inner lives of children and teenagers, particularly teenage girls. And as the decision’s become a political football between the school administration and the Chicago Teacher’s Union, it’s also become a test case in how to handle changes to curriculum poorly, in a way that shows a lack of respect both for students and for strong material itself.

Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the chief executive officer of the Chicago Public School system wrote in a letter to principals in her system that: “We have determined Persepolis may be appropriate for junior and senior students and those in Advance Placement classes. Due to the powerful images of torture in the book, I have asked our Office of Teaching & Learning to develop professional development guidelines, so that teachers can be trained to present this strong, but important content. We are also considering whether the book should be included, after appropriate teacher training, in the curriculum of eighth through tenth grades. Once this curricular determination has been made, we will notify you.” It’s unclear why the school system couldn’t have made this determination over the summer, rather than in the middle of the year, so that the decision would be consistent over a year of students in the system.

I don’t necessarily think it’s the worst thing in the world to determine that a work can be more fully absorbed by students who are both older, and who have been better-prepared for certain material by other parts of the curriculum, whether it’s history, geography, or other literature. But that determination should be made based on those concerns, and announced in a way that is reflective of a concern about the overall efficacy of curriculum design. Pulling the book from the rotation mid-year can’t help but look like the decision is in response to a parent complaint, rather than a genuine reassessment of how best to present a work that the school system continues to think is important and is committed to presenting in a way that will be to the book’s best advantage as well as to its students’. This seems like it would have been particularly important given that, as the Chicago Teacher’s Union points out, many elementary schools in the system don’t have libraries, so removing Persepolis from the classroom is effectively removing student access to the book, at least in a school setting.

It’s also easy in cases like these to appear that you’re showing a lack of respect for what students can handle. The portrayals of torture in Persepolis aren’t exceptionally graphic. They are, like everything else in the book, in black and white, in fairly simple outlines. Gashes from a beating don’t suppurate—they stand out in sharp relief. The way the pain of them is communicated is through the main character’s reaction. The experience of reading Persepolis as a child or teenager is the experience of seeing the impact of torture on someone very like yourself, who likes punk music, and gets angry at God, and alternately adores and fights with her parents. It’s a book that trusts teenagers to handle the idea of torture and the concept of war because its author had to handle those things not just in practice, but in reality, when her relatives were tortured and her friends’ older siblings were sent off to die in war with keys to paradise around their necks. Believing that children shouldn’t experience those things for real shouldn’t be the same thing as believing that they can’t being trusted to experience the sadness, fear, and anger that will help them navigate the world as moral adults. A school system that’s afraid of its ability to handle introducing students to these kind of emotions or ideas is one that doesn’t seem to trust its teachers or itself very much.

On Friday, Motion Picture Association of America president and CEO Christopher Dodd took the stage at the National Press Club to talk about his first several years on the job. It was an interesting talk less because of policy issues that Dodd focused on, or that he discussed during the question-and-answer period, but because of the way he talked about movies, and what they’ve come to mean to him as art during his almost two years at the association. In arguing for movies’ unifying role in a politically divided country, and movies and television as key tools of cultural diplomacy, Dodd’s talk raised some fascinating questions for me about how we approach and analyze movies, and what levels of responsibility we want to assign an art form that claims that potential impact.

Dodd admitted that before coming to the MPAA, “As a father of two very young children, 7, now almost 8, and 11, my movie selections were limited.” But as he’s reconnected with the product that his member companies produce, Dodd made an argument that both serves to burnish the reputation of those companies, and potentially exposes them to higher standards than your average producer of widgets.

“They tell stories, stories that help us make sense of our world and ourselves…Consider the focus on racism in To Kill A Mockingbird or Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” Dodd said. “The best movies ground us in common values and ideals. America’s a big place, as we all know, with red states and blue states…But gathered together in a darkened theater, regardless of our differences, we become, in spite of our differences, one place.”

The ability of movies to achieve that unity or provoke that kind of thought doesn’t mean that all movies have to meet that aspirational standard. But it does suggest that movies that do aim to tackle big ideas deserve to be taken seriously, which means being examined critically. Often, debates over accuracy get dismissed as nit-picking, which if the only question at stake is whether a movie is a literal translation of historical events or not, is potentially fair. But the questions of why and when movies choose to diverge from the historical record is can be rich ones, particularly when those questions happen in the realm of character interpretation, as in the presentation of President Lincoln’s attitudes toward black Americans in Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. As a critic who writes about the politics of entertainment, it’s been exciting to see academics, policy reporters, and political commentators enter the debates around Lincoln, Argo, Django Unchained, and Zero Dark Thirty because their desire to play on this turf is a reaffirmation of the idea that gives life to my career, even if I’m not always thrilled about how these arguments have functioned. The battles over how to interpret Zero Dark Thirty , for example, seem to me to have narrowed down to debates about whether the film is an accurate transcription of a murky historical record, rather than exploring the more revealing questions of how the script and directing choices shape the movie’s message about the immorality of torture, and why Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow felt compelled to portray the movie as an unbiased piece of reportage in the first place. That latter choice in particular says as much about the state of our debate about the use of torture as the movie itself.

If we’re going to take film seriously on the grounds that it has a unique power to influence audiences, we need to examine how well it does at getting audiences to do interpretive work—and leaving them space in which to do it—to open themselves up to new ideas, and to inhabit new perspectives. The blunt statements of opinion writing or cable news appearances, or the clear conclusion-drawing of long-form journalism aren’t necessarily the things that serve those goals well in film, where an indirect approach may lead otherwise-resistant audiences to a point they might not have accepted when presented bluntly, and manifestos can make characters seem like strawmen, rather than flesh-and-blood humans.
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Laura Murphy, whose son is a senior in high school in Fairfax County, Virginia, doesn’t think he—or anyone else—should be reading Beloved in their English classes, and she’s on a quest to get it bumped from the curriculum. Per Raw Story:

“I’m not some crazy book burner,” Murphy, a mother of four, insisted to the Post. “I have great respect and admiration for our Fairfax County educators. The school system is second to none. But I disagree with the administration at a policy level.”

In spite of the awards and accolades won by Beloved and its author, who won a Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, Murphy feels that the book’s theme of the brutality of slavery and scenes depicting gang rape, infant murder and violence are too intense for high school seniors. She said her son had nightmares when he had to read the book for his senior English course.

“It’s not about the author or the awards,” said Murphy. “It’s about the content.” On Thursday, the Fairfax County School Board voted not to hear Murphy’s challenge to the book. She now plans to take her fight to the Virginia Board of Education.

The thing about sending your children to public school is that you’re consenting to give up a certain amount of control over what they’re exposed to, because one of the major points of public schools is to make sure students have a pre-established set of skills and cultural references in common. And that often means teaching children things that their parents don’t know, or giving them access to literature and history that their parents might not have at home, or frankly, might not want them to read or learn about. It also, on an emotional level, means letting your children come into contact with ideas and art that will expand their sense of the world.

An associated risk of that is that they might be upset by some of the things they learn about the world. Racism is frightening. So is sexual assault. But both of those things have happened in the United States, and for many people, continue to be major factors that affect their day-to-day life. And I think high school seniors, especially those who will be going off to colleges where they have much more sexual autonomy, and will be dealing with larger and more diverse peer groups, not only are old enough to understand the reality of those facts and to be confronted with the emotional impacts they have, but really ought to be confronted by them. I’m not a parent yet, but my understanding is that parenting is a balance between protecting children from things they genuinely don’t have the capacity to process—Wu-Tang may be for the children, but I’m not sure Toni Morrison is—and helping them process the difficult things they have the moral and emotional ability to confront, even if that involves hard work on your, and their parts.

If Murphy’s son is having nightmares about slavery and gang rape, that actually seems to suggest that he’s pretty attuned to the emotional horror of racial and sexual violence. Maybe, instead of trying to protect him from those feelings, she could find some way for him to channel them into productive anti-racist or anti-sexist work. That would be much better college prep (and resume-building) for him than trying to save him, and other seniors, from being upset. I doubt Murphy is going to have much luck with the Virginia Board of Education. And she’ll have much less with whatever institution of higher learning he heads off to.