This academic year, the McMinn County, Tennessee, school board unanimously decided to take the Pulitzer Prize–winning memoir Maus by cartoonist Art Spiegelman out of the classroom. The book was required reading for an eighth-grade Holocaust module.
Spiegelman recounts his parents’ experiences as survivors of Auschwitz in his book Maus. He depicts Jews as mice and Nazis as cats in an attempt to subvert the clichés of traditional funny animal comics. The book’s unexpected critical and commercial success served as the cornerstone of comics’ recent 35-year ascent to significant literary prominence.
The book’s initial assignment to eighth-graders can be partially explained by the fact that comics have long been associated with kids. Its disruption of those expectations set off McMinn County’s educational bureaucrats. Concerns about “eight curse words” (not specified, but the book’s coarse language is mostly of the “bitch” and “goddamn” level) and one “graphic image” (again, unspecified but likely a very easy-to-miss image of the top half of a naked woman’s dead body—the body portrayed as human, not mouse) were raised at the beginning of the school board meeting about Maus.
The Holocaust curriculum for the eighth grade used Maus as its “anchor text,” along with additional readings like survivor testimonies and news articles. One board member, however, felt that middle school students shouldn’t be made aware of the horrors of the Holocaust. According to him, Maus “shows people hanging and it shows them killing kids.” “Why does the educational system advocate for such things? It is not sage or beneficial.” Another board member appeared to be unaware of the very point of historical narratives: “This book’s language directly contradicts some of our policies. We would take disciplinary action against a child if they announced they were going to kill you on the school bus.”
According to one board member, “it would probably mean we would have to move on to another module” if a suitable replacement to anchor that Holocaust module wasn’t found.
Maus’ weekly sales increased by about 50% the week after the news of the curriculum removal broke.
