The Educators Who Decided That Context Doesn’t Matter

Humans of all political persuasions have a tendency to lose sight of why taboos exist and to enforce them rigidly rather than thoughtfully. In two recent cases, American educators chose quality instructional material for their students, only to be stymied by illiberal authority figures who apparently believe that, whenever objectionable words are mentioned, context doesn’t matter.

The first example comes from red America: School-board officials in McMinn County, Tennessee, , Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic novel about Holocaust survivors, from its eighth-grade curriculum, largely because of eight curse words, including , in, “but we are talking about things that if a student went down the hallway and said this, our disciplinary policy says they can be disciplined, and rightfully so.”