Kids, Grow Up! Parents, Let Them!
The reinforcing cycle of "safetyism" and its role in school bannings.
“Maus” Banned
A few weeks ago the news world was ablaze over news that the McMinn County Board of Education in Tennessee voted to remove “Maus” from its curriculum. “Maus” is a graphic novel written by Art Spiegelman that depicts the Holocaust and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. I purposely didn’t talk about the event at the time because the outrage seemed like another blip in the seemingly endless culture warring that captivates too much attention. The removal of “Maus” was used as the perfect encapsulation of a growing partisan trend of public schools banning books, concepts, or ideas from being included in the school curriculum or being taught at all.
Generally speaking, the books, concepts, or ideas being banned are banned because of their content regarding either race or sexuality/gender. As a result, many conservatives are in favor of these things being banned, while progressives are largely against such bans. I generally want education to be as local as possible (preferably down to the parental level via school choice), so I don’t particularly care about the substance of these bans one way or the other. Local communities or parents can ban whatever books, concepts, or ideas they want, and it doesn’t matter if I agree with them or not as long as I have the power to send my child elsewhere.
I bring up the banning of “Maus” not because of whether I agree with it or not, but to discuss the local school board’s reasoning for banning it. According to a statement by the school board, “Maus” was removed from the curriculum because “of its unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide.”
I’m not that interested in whether this is the “real” reason the school board removed the book or not; I am willing to take them at their word that they believed the material in the book was inappropriate for 8th graders. I’m also not that interested in talking about whether I think this was the right choice or not; people have different judgments all of the time regarding what is age-appropriate for their children. Upon reading their statement again though, I realized that I actually understood their decision more than I initially thought.
I want to be clear: I don’t think the book’s content (from what I’ve gathered I haven’t actually read it) should be inappropriate for 8th graders. If that’s the case, why do I understand it? Well, for those who don’t know, I am a middle school history teacher that teaches world history, and I don’t think I would teach “Maus” for the same reason cited by the school board. I think it would be too inappropriate for my students and would be considered inappropriate by their parents as well.
Now, I will say that I teach 6th and 7th graders, so slightly younger than the 8th graders involved in McMinn County. Also, I teach at a private Christian school, so slightly different school environment than a public school environment. Nonetheless, I think that I would avoid teaching “Maus” because of its inappropriateness as well. Whether it should be inappropriate for middle school and whether it is inappropriate for middle school students are two different questions though. In other words, I am not making excuses but rather offering an explanation for why I understand the school board’s decision to remove the book from it’s curriculum and seeking to offer a solution to the banning of seemingly appropriate material from school curriculums.
One caveat is that I do think that there is a difference between me as an individual teacher making the pedagogical decision not to teach “Maus” and a school board removing it from the curriculum. This makes the school board’s decision all the more interesting to me though. At one point, “Maus” was deemed an appropriate book to teach the Holocaust to 8th graders and now it is deemed inappropriate. What changed? I would argue nothing has changed overnight, but this is the product of continuing trends and untruths that have been years in the making.
Trends and Untruths
Let me be honest up front and say that I’m not offering this up as a conclusive analysis of the McMinn County Board of Education’s decision or banning. Yet, I can’t help but views these decisions as a manifestation and continuation of trends and untruths already discussed regarding Generation Z: they grow up slowly at least in part due to overprotective parenting. I draw these ideas largely from Jean Twenge’s book iGen and Jonathan Haidt + Greg Lukianoff’s book The Coddling of the American Mind.
In iGen, Twenge concludes that Gen Z “teens are growing up more slowly, eschewing adult activities until they are older.” Twenge draws this conclusion by evaluating the rate of Gen Z teens that partake in more adult behaviors such as having jobs, drinking alcohol, possessing a driver’s license, etc. compared to previous generations. In almost every one of these categories, Twenge finds that Gen Z participates in all of them less than teens in previous generations.
In an attempt to figure out the cause Twenge writes,
Their [Gen Z] parents made childhood a wonderful place with lots of praise, an emphasis on fun, and few responsibilities. No wonder they don’t want to grow up… never having known another parenting style, iGen doesn’t rebel against parents’ overprotection—instead, they embrace it.
Lukianoff and Haidt reiterate the overprotectiveness of parents with what they call “safetyism”— defined as “a culture or belief system in which safety (which includes ‘emotional safety’) has become a sacred value.” The pair believe that safetyism as risen out of a “Greath Untruth” that children are fragile rather than antifragile. They claim that children are like our immune system in that they “*require* stressors and challenges in order to learn, adapt, and grow.” By overemphasizing safety, parents are depriving “young people of the experiences that their antifragile minds need, thereby making them more fragile, anxious, and prone to seeing themselves as victims.”
Essentially, Gen Z is less willing (and less prepared) to grow up and leave the safe environment created by their overprotective parents.
Connection to Banning Books
In an Atlantic article that predated The Coddling of the American Mind, Lukianoff and Haidt first wrote about a change they observed in students on college campuses across the country. This was in 2015 when the concepts like “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” were beginning to be demanded on college campuses from students. They wrote, “A movement is arising, undirected and driven largely by students, to scrub campuses clean of words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense.”
In The Coddling of the American Mind, Lukianoff and Haidt fleshed out the connection between safetyism (along with other factors) and the rise in these student-led aversions of “words, ideas, and subjects that might cause discomfort or give offense” on college campuses. I believe the same connection can be made between safetyism and the rise in banning or removing books, concepts, and ideas from various school districts across the country.
I don’t think it is the intention of most parents to make sure their child forever lives in ignorance about various aspects of life. For example, a parent may not want their 6 year old running around knowing all about sex, but if they ever want a grandchild, then they better hope that their child learns about sex at some point. There are some parents that would prefer to keep their child ignorant about the world, but I don’t think that is the norm.
This applies to school bannings. Parents don’t want a particular book, concept, or idea banned because they want their student to remain ignorant of it forever; rather, the students are too young to comprehend and the material is too “adult.” In a sense, it isn’t “safe” for them yet.
This is obvious in the case of banning “Maus,” but why would school districts ban teaching concepts like critical race theory if not for partisan reasons? Well, teaching that whiteness is a social construct that brings with it certain privileges inherent in our social structure to 6 year-olds is going to get lost in translation because 6 year-olds can’t comprehend such abstract concepts. Thus, 6 year-olds won’t understand the intricacies of critical race theory but will probably only hear that white people have it better than black people because of their race (or something close to that). They are simply too young to comprehend and parents want to protect them from misunderstanding. By banning critical race theory for all K-12 students, school boards and states are saying that everyone, from 6 years old to 18 years old, is too young to properly comprehend it.
At the core, banning “Maus” for 8th graders and critical race theory for all of K-12 is the same: the students are simply too young and it would be inappropriate for the material to be taught to them.
This helps explain the recent push for school boards to ban certain books, concepts, and ideas. The rise in partisanship can explain some of it, but I submit that it is also the product of the infantilization of children caused by safetyism. With the transition to virtual learning due to COVID, parents became more aware of what their children were being taught and their tendency towards safetyism kicked in.
As parents turn safety into a sacred value, they leave their children “too fragile” to face the world and its difficulties as Lukianoff and Haidt observed. Because children are increasingly too fragile, they are increasingly choosing to remain in their parents’ nests and not branch out to experience the world as observed by Twenge. Thus, the cycle reinforces itself: parents continue to prioritize safety over everything and children remain fragile while increasingly avoiding the world.
In response to the banning of “Maus” Yair Rosenberg cheekily wrote,
“It is indeed a shame that the Jews of Europe did not have the foresight to die in a more family-friendly fashion. One hopes that the school board will find a more wholesome way to discuss the Nazi genocide.”
Rosenberg’s point is the the absurdity of such an attempt. The Holocaust, and the world in general, isn’t “family-friendly” and it is absurd to try and make it that way. Yet, this is exactly what the reinforcing cycle of safetyism attempts, which means the problem of banning books, concepts, and ideas won’t be solved until the underlying demand for such actions is addressed.
Books like “Maus” and ideas like critical race theory do “cause discomfort or give offense.” Thanks to safetyism, kids (such as middle schoolers) are too fragile to handle the “stressors and challenges” that they need to endure in order to learn from such things. Therefore, the material is (generally speaking) inappropriate for them; maybe it shouldn’t be inappropriate for middle schoolers, but it is nonetheless. Because the demand to ban will remain as long as material remains inappropriate, the only solution is for kids to grow up and for parents to let them.
God Bless,
Hunter Burnett