Teacher reprimanded after student
sees nude art on museum trip

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

School board members have voted to not renew the contract of a veteran art teacher who was reprimanded after one of her fifth-grade students saw a nude sculpture during a school trip to a museum.

Sydney McGee has been on paid administrative leave from Fisher Elementary School since Friday, said her attorney Rogge Dunn.

McGee's contract runs through the end of the school year and it was unclear whether she would remain on leave until then. Her attorney said he would wait for written confirmation and clarification from the school district to decide how to proceed.

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Okay, we are officially in the middle of a Puritanical frenzy. Back in June, I learned of a woman in upstate New York who had lost custody of her child because of a performance art piece in which she was involved that mocked Christianity and included some nudity. Shortly after that, I read about some district officials gunning for a high school art teacher who had posed for some topless art photos that ended up online. More recently, there was the story of the Oklahoma police chief who was forced to resign due to the moralistic outcry over his wife's online nude photos.

Now this shit.

One could argue that this scandal, and I say "scandal" because booting an art teacher for exposing her students to art is downright scandalous, is actually much more the result of paranoid administrators overreacting than it is about my perception of an alarming rise in absolutist anti-sex and anti-nudity attitudes. After all, I spent six years in a bumfuck town in Texas teaching theater classes, myself, and my feeling the whole time was that the district needed students to get their state mandated fine arts credit, but didn't like, understand, or value the arts. Consequently, it was my job to simply process students through my classroom while keeping as low of a profile as possible--any controversy at all was automatically my fault, which severely hampered my abilities as a teacher. Clearly, much of the public education establishment is, quite literally, old school. The arts aren't reading, writing, 'rithmetic, or football, and are therefore useless for anything other than complying with state regulations.

Of course, that's total bullshit. Besides the intrinsic cultural value that comes from studying the arts, students who do so tend to score higher than their peers on standardized tests. But what can you do? "Educators," contrary to popular opinion, are some of the most conservative people in the country.

So the nude sculpture issue in the story above may simply be paranoia combined with disrespect for art, but given the proliferation of such instances, along with the freak-out over Janet Jackson's Superbowl nipple, the impeachment of a good President for a private sexual affair, and numerous other examples of Taliban-like tendencies in American culture, I'm not ready to dismiss this as something else. The big dumb cunt-faces of fundamentalist morality are out there fucking with perfectly innocent Americans, and they're doing it much more than they used to.

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