Indecent

 Jeffrey St. Clair >> 

 
+ A performing arts school in Duval County Florida cancelled a production of Paula Vogel’s play Indecent, saying that the play’s same-sex romance and dialogue, where inappropriate for the age group. They replaced Vogel’s Incident with Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull, a play about romantic obsession among four straight people that ends with one of them shooting himself in the head.

+ In the same Duvall County school system, a third-grade book about Hank Aaron (Henry Aaron’s Dream) is under review, because it talks about the racism Aaron faced in the Jim Crow South. I wouldn’t be surprised if Florida’s Great Patriotic textbooks start claiming that MLB started after the Negro Leagues refused to let whites play…

+ An Ohio teacher, who was reading Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches to her Grade 3 class as part of NPR’s Planet Money podcast on how economics gets discussed and taught in children’s books., was abruptly cut off by a school administrator when a student observed that: “It’s almost like what happened back then, how people were treated. Like, disrespected. Like, white people disrespected Black people.” The administrator said the reading was halted because the parents hadn’t been “pre-warned” that the topic of racism might be discussed.