Thursday
Somehow I missed this Washington Post story so thanks to reader Maeve for alerting me to it. I can’t tell it better than reporters Laura Vozzella and Nate Jones:
A high school senior in rural Riner, Va., reported his English teacher to state authorities for the way she was teaching Beowulf.
“All my teacher wants to talk about is how the book is sexist because it portrays the warriors as men and not women,” the student wrote Jan. 30 to the teacher tip line that Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) had just set up to banish “divisive concepts” from public education. “I believe my teacher is in violation of Governor Youngkin’s Executive Order, which prohibits the teaching of ‘divisive topics.’”
First, a caution: I can think of many examples over the years of students hearing something different than what the teacher actually said. (I learned this early in my career.) Sometimes they hear half a thought, sometimes they miss humor, sometimes they don’t realize that a teacher is being provocative to spark a discussion. So we can’t know what this particular teacher really said.
Still, given that Beowulf is a very male work, I can imagine a teacher acknowledging this and the student taking offense. And it’s certainly the case that women students these days are often searching for woman warriors in their literature, which they won’t find in Beowulf. Although, come to think of it, there’s Grendel’s Mother. Oh, and Thryth, who has men killed who come into her hall. But sure, Beowulf was written for a society in which men did all the fighting. To call it sexist is meaningless given that most of human history has had the same division of labor.
The tip line, on the other hand, is something else again. It was set up by Youngkin to burnish his culture war credentials. He initially established during the closing weeks of his campaign when he ran an ad about a high school student (and son of a rightwing activist) who supposedly had been traumatized by Toni Morrison’s Beloved. (You can read my account of it here.)
Anyway, back to the tip line, which the Post reporters describe as follows:
Shortly after taking office in January, Youngkin announced that parents should report teachers who discuss “divisive” concepts in the classroom by emailing [email protected].
“We’re asking for folks to send us reports and observations,” Youngkin said in a radio interview around the same time. “Help us be aware of … their child being denied their rights that parents have in Virginia, and we’re going to make sure we catalogue it all. … And that gives us further, further ability to make sure we’re rooting it out.
The idea of such a spy system, of course, recalls George Orwell’s 1984:
Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it. The songs, the processions, the banners, the hiking, the drilling with dummy rifles, the yelling of slogans, the worship of Big Brother–it was all a sort of glorious game to them. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a week passed in which The Times did not carry a paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little sneak–‘child hero’ was the phrase generally used–had overheard some compromising remark and denounced its parents to the Thought Police.
Fortunately, in Youngkin’s case the public hasn’t gone along. The Post reports that his administration “quietly pulled the plug on the tip line in September as tips dried up.”
If this particular initiative has failed, however, others are going full speed ahead. Reports are coming out of Texas rural school districts of hundreds of books being pulled off of school library shelves. These include some of Neil Gaiman’s fantasies (American Gods, The Anansi Boys, and The Ocean at the End of the Lane), which have been deemed only appropriate for adults. The Hobbit, meanwhile, is now reserved for students in sixth grade and above.
For the record, I fell in love with Hobbit when I was in third grade. Many of my college students, meanwhile, read all of Gaiman’s works while they were in high school.
I’m searching for a list of the other books targeted by the Texas school, but I’ll say here that it sounds like the fascist right wants children reading below grade level in addition to engaging in one-dimensional thinking. Which I suppose is one approach to getting the next generation to adopt nutty conspiracy theories and dumb lies.