Texas School Board Bans Illustrated Edition of The Diary of Anne Frank

Accord­ing to a recent sur­vey con­duct­ed by the Texas State Teach­ers Asso­ci­a­tion, 70% of sur­veyed teach­ers said they were seri­ous­ly think­ing about leav­ing the teach­ing pro­fes­sion. “Lin­ger­ing stress from the pan­dem­ic is a fac­tor, but it isn’t the only one. Inad­e­quate pay, polit­i­cal attacks on edu­ca­tors and the fail­ure of state lead­ers to pro­tect the health and safe­ty of stu­dents and school employ­ees also have com­bined to dri­ve down the morale of teach­ers to the low­est lev­el in recent mem­o­ry and endan­ger our pub­lic school sys­tem,” TSTA Pres­i­dent Ovidia Moli­na said.

We recent­ly saw how Texas’ edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem has become a vast polit­i­cal mine­field, with con­ser­v­a­tive leg­is­la­tors attempt­ing to ban 800+ books from school libraries–pri­mar­i­ly because the books make stu­dents feel “uncom­fort­able.” This week, the Keller Inde­pen­dent School Dis­trict in Fort Worth, Texas decid­ed to can­cel an acclaimed illus­trat­ed adap­ta­tion of The Diary of Anne Frank, echo­ing the recent deci­sion by a Ten­nessee School board to ban Maus, the Pulitzer-Prize win­ning graph­ic nov­el on the Holo­caust. The ban of The Diary of Anne Frank was trig­gered by a par­ent com­plaint, which the right-lean­ing school board decid­ed to hon­or. Why would think­ing peo­ple want to opt out of teach­ing in the Texas edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem? It’s not hard to imag­ine.

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Relat­ed Con­tent 

Ten­nessee School Board Bans Maus, the Pulitzer-Prize Win­ning Graph­ic Nov­el on the Holo­caust; the Book Becomes #1 Best­seller on Ama­zon

The 850 Books a Texas Law­mak­er Wants to Ban Because They Could Make Stu­dents Feel Uncom­fort­able

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism


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Comments (5)
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  • DM says:

    The title is mis­lead­ing. It’s a ver­sion of the Diary of Anne Frank. Not an out­right ban. That does­n’t make it ok and TX is going down­hill fast but your title is mis­lead­ing.

    But I’m guess­ing you knew that when you used it. Clicks

  • Avery Linnard says:

    The Ama­zon Edi­to­r­i­al Reviews of ‘Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graph­ic Adap­ta­tion’ sug­gest that the book is enlight­en­ing and whole­some. For exam­ple:

    “How does one breathe new life into a tale that is now so famil­iar that it risks los­ing its pow­er to shock and instruct? Fol­man and Polon­sky, the duo behind the film Waltz with Bashir, use the right tools to show us how it’s done.

    Some may ask why Anne Frank’s sto­ry needs a graph­ic adap­ta­tion, but the beau­ty of these pages pro­vides the answer. It gives read­ers a strong visu­al idea of what Anne’s secret annex behind a book­case was like, where she strug­gled to make sense of her short and trag­ic life. Anoth­er pan­el shows a hypo­thet­i­cal wed­ding day that will break your heart all over again.” — Lind­say Pereira, Huff­Post”

  • Kyle Tracey says:

    https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/anne-frank-diary-banned-texas/

    Snopes says there is no ban of this book in Texas. This is just click­bait to make it look like “con­ser­v­a­tives” are ban­ning books i.e. like nazis or some­thing.

  • Carl says:

    They also banned The Bible. That’s hilar­i­ous! What goes around, comes around!

  • OC says:

    Snopes says: The book “was tem­porar­i­ly removed from school dis­trict book­shelves for re-review due to a new­ly enact­ed pol­i­cy and set of stan­dards. How­ev­er, this did not con­sti­tute a ‘ban.”

    Excuse us, but if books are being removed from libraries for polit­i­cal rea­sons, but not tech­ni­cal­ly banned, that seems like a dis­tinc­tion with­out a dif­fer­ence. Until the books are returned, they are being cen­sored.

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