CSotD: Marjane Satrapi turned me into a newt
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The word came across on Twitter yesterday and spread from there: The Chicago Public School system was banning Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoir, Persepolis, and had ordered all copies hunted down and confiscated.
I passed an early link along to my granddaughter, a high school junior whom I have been corrupting with comics for several years now. I'd given her Persepolis several years ago as one of her first graphic novels.
And, while these things can easily get blown out of proportion, the documentation on this one appeared to be pretty straightforward:
When you see something this stupid, experience should tell you that, while it is clearly a mistake, the question to ask is whether it is a mistake with teeth, or a mistake without teeth?
That is, did somebody call a meeting, sit down, discuss the matter, and come up with an incredibly stupid decision?
Or was it simply a case of misinterpretation, something, perhaps, along the lines of "Will nobody rid me of this troublesome priest?" or "There, my Lord! There is your enemy! There are your guns!"
Apparently, more of the latter, according to this link (tip of the hat to Tom Spurgeon at the Comics Reporter, who has additional material in his coverage).
I suppose all's well that ends well. The books were not removed, simply noted as probably not appropriate for classroom use by seventh graders, which I am okay with, to an extent.
That is, I think the school library must contain books that are not appropriate for everyone in the school, and not appropriate for teaching to an entire grade level.
I'm also in favor of a little guidance, to the extent of noting which books are apt to stir up trouble, though that's different than mandating one-size-fits-all curricula.
One size does not fit all, and sometimes a teacher who has used a challenging book in class for the past several years will, a few weeks into the new school session, assess the level of her current crop of kids and say, "Okay, not this year."
Or the opposite: She may be blown away by a particular class one year and seize the opportunity to ratchet things up.
I think my granddaughter may have been in seventh grade when I gave her Persepolis, but, then, that's one kid, not 25 or 30. I don't have a problem with someone saying that seventh graders, in general, are not prepared for the brutality of the Iranian revolution as depicted in that book, or for the issues of sexuality and personal freedom it discusses.
I say that as someone who once attempted to teach "Hamlet" to a small group of bright eighth-graders, only to be stunned and dismayed by how concrete their thinking still was and how utterly beyond them any of the subtexts of the play remained.
However, and that said, I've had a couple of experiences with stupid people in large groups, and it's not encouraging.
I always did better getting curricula into the classrooms in small, rural schools than in the larger districts in the city. For several years, I blamed it on the arrogance of the large districts and the desperation of the small, thinking that, with less funding, the smaller schools were more willing to look at special offers.
Not quite.
I sat down one year with the curriculum specialist from a fairly large district, where "fairly large" means there were perhaps a dozen classrooms in each grade level, rather than three. I showed her the available material (which was free, which is a good price) and she was quite impressed. She promised to recommend it particularly to the fourth and fifth grades in the district and said she hoped that all of her teachers would make use of it.
Not one classroom ordered anything.
It turned out that, her recommendations notwithstanding, everything had to be decided by a curriculum committee, that it was a matter of bureaucracy. At a small school, the three fifth grade teachers can sit down and chat about things they've come across, but once you get to the size where committees are appointed, individual teachers may never even see materials.
The committee may decide that "Persepolis" or "Bridge to Terabithia" or "Of Mice and Men" is beyond the ken of a particular grade level, and that's more or less it. And all it takes is for the right committee member to say, "Ooo, no, I don't think so."
Nothing against teachers, mind you. I've covered school board meetings where there is a long, detailed and, to my mind, clear, expert and persuasive presentation, at the end of which a particular board member says, "Yeah, but …" and his remarks then reveal that he has no idea what was being laid out in front of him.
Whereupon seven hands go up in support of him, three go up in favor of the presentation, and it dies, whatever it was, whatever its merits. Good old Bob was agin it, and good old Bob has been on the board for 15 years.
What's the answer?
Well, one answer is small schools with small class sizes, in which well-trained teachers have the autonomy to make their own decisions.
And where unicorns dance with mermaids over fields of brightly colored rainbow-flowers.
The other is that, when something this stupid happens, the people it happens to need to rise up and raise hell, which is what occurred in this case and what made someone in a position of power ask, "Wait a minute — what just happened here?"
Which is how this particular stupid decision got reversed.
But that can't happen every time, because a lot of stupid decisions come down before anything has begun. The relevant factor here is that the books were already out there to be collected, which means that the kids and teachers had already seen and embraced them.
I guess I'm thinking that this is kind of like when the customs people would summon reporters to a news conference to show us the stacked blocks of cocaine they had seized and explain how they caught the perps.
It was a good catch and good police work, but it didn't answer the question of how many other blocks of cocaine had passed over the border undetected.
I'm glad Persepolis is back on the shelves in Chicago.
And I wonder what isn't?
Now, in honor of both stupidity and the season, and the fact that Ireland probably comes right after Iran on some list or other, this relevant offering:
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