It’s ironic (or maybe just sad) that in this, the week when we remember the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and Dachau, today’s Washington Post included a story about how the Culpeper County, Virginia public schools decided to stop assigning the full version of The Diary of Anne Frank because “a parent complained that the book includes sexually explicit material and homosexual themes.” Children in the Culpeper schools will still be able to read an older, and presumably less-offensive-to-one-parent version of the book, but the full text of the book is now out of their history curriculum.
We could spend all day wringing our hands at the very idea that we’ve reached the stage where a public school district will change its curriculum because one parent objects to one assignment. But that’s a debate for other blogs.
Instead, I have to ask why it is that our children must be protected from the reality of the past?
Anne Frank’s story is well-known to almost everyone who grew up in the United States in the past several decades, because her Diary has been a standard assignment for students in the late middle or early high school years since at least the early 1970s. Hers is a story that is sad, glorious, poignant, raw, difficult, and in the end, tragic. But it’s not like the Holocaust was a happy story. And yet, in the midst of the mayhem of the period from 1933-1945, a young girl’s voice has spoken to generation after generation of school children because hers is an authentic voice, not one made up by writers in Hollywood or anywhere else. It is the reality of Anne Frank as a person–a teenager much like them except for the fact that she’s trapped in an attic and dies in a concentration camp–that speaks to young people.
And I’ve got news for the concerned parents of Culpeper County–your children are already having sex, so it’s not like the fact that Anne Frank mentions her vagina is going to result in a general moral decline among youth in the county. I make this statement not just based on the common sense assumption that teenagers are having sex in America, but based on data. According to the Virginia Division of Health Statistics, the number of teenage pregnancies in Culpeper County rose 20% from 2002 to 2008. Because the unedited version of Anne Frank’s Diary only recently made it into the curriculum–and then only for a short time–we can hardly blame Ms. Frank for the rapidly rising teen pregnancy rate in the county.
As I write this post my children are 10 and 13 and so of the age when they are confronting the bad side of humanity and the bad side of our past. My oldest has a close friend who can’t play outside because his neighborhood is too dangerous. My youngest has had to work his way through the sudden and unexplained death of a teammate’s mother last spring. They know life is hard and they know that humans can be cruel and capricious one day and loving and predictable the next.
Editing historical sources to sanitize them in ways that won’t offend one person or another does our children a grave disservice. As much as we’d like to keep them safe from the realities of life, they see through our attempts much more easily than we’d like to admit. Instead of hiding the reality of Anne Frank from them, we should teach them the reality, even the parts that might make us uncomfortable. How else are they going to learn?
This is the Mills I remember. Thanks!
Mills,
I think I would be amazed by this if I didn’t work in the school systems currently. Instead this doesn’t surprise me, sadden me yes but this is not surprising at all. What I have begun to find amazing is the number of parents now a days believe that public school should be soley dedicated to giving facts and nothing more. Opinions and primary sources be damned, heaven forbid that children actually get to hear about what happened full of emotion and honesty, because it is the emotions of the time that cause parents to be offended and notice it is the parents being offended not the students. I know that as a result of this many school systems no longer read any version of The Diary of Anne Frank, instead they read a portion of the play which has drastic changes to it and loses any sense of emotion that is given to us by Anne’s words. Night is also often left out of the curriculum, because it is seen as too graphic in nature for young minds now a days. But this has been a very recent change, 9 years ago when I was in middle school every student read one of those two stories, there was a whole unit dedicated to literature from the Holocaust. What I have to wonder is what is going to happen to this generation that has been given a censored history of the world when they reach the world of higher education. How do you fill in all the gaps that have been created by an education that has been more concered with not offending anyone than they have been about offering the truth?
Where are the advocates for sanity in cases like this?
I recently tried explaining who Martin Luther King, Jr. was to my almost 5-year old son. I’m not sure he grasped the concept of segregation, but I saw no reason not to tell him about it in terms I thought he could understand. This book’s story on Rosa Parks was helpful:
http://www.amazon.com/American-Story-True-Tales-History/dp/0375812563
It depresses me a bit that sexuality and homosexuality is seen as irrevocably scarring, but the general concept of the holocaust, of all things, is fine. If anything should make us uncomfortable, you’d think it would be the systematic murder of millions of innocent people, rather than teenaged hormones.
Most people wouldn’t think twice about including the holocaust in the curriculum, and rightly so; we *should* learn about one of the most horrific things to happen in recent history, and we *should* learn how something like that can happen. But most importantly, we should learn about the people it hurt; how they were just like us, sexuality and all. Otherwise what is there to make us feel empathy?
Oh, so well written, Mills: thank you, it’s brilliant!
On a sidenote (no connection to the Holocaust, but remembering “en passant” an author who just left us): when I was 13 or 14, my daddy gave me the Italian translation of “The Catcher in the Rye”. Loved it!
When I was 15, our Italian teacher made us read that very same novel in class (despite it not being a book originally written in Italian): the teacher got an earful from a number of parents, the kids loved Holden Caulfield, some of them learned (thanks to Holden’s – shall we say? – “sometimes rough and straightforward” talk) that reading is great fun. (At a very reasonable price point, I might add.)
I later re-read “The Catcher…”: several times the Italian translation, twice the English original, once the German version (“Der Fänger im Roggen”: sounds different, doesn’t it?). And I’ll always be grateful to Mr. Salinger for giving us Holden Caulfield.
And yet, what I remember with deepest affection are not the generously dispensed four-letter words (come on!: we already knew’em and used’em every day; it was just fun to see them printed in a book), but the philosophical question centered on Central Parks’s ducks: where do they go when the little lake freezes?
And so we quickly come back to what really matters: the weather…
Vasco’s final comment made me laugh, with this now being the 8th?? day of the cancellation of school…weather really is all that matters. But on to your blog entry, you made wonderful points and it could be argued that teaching history is a “gentle” way of introducing our kids to (the good and) the bad side of life, the part we want desperately to protect them from, but realize we can’t. You said it very well.