Censored elementary school musicals in trying times
Nothing is more American than speaking up, making your case, getting it off your chest, with the possible exception of telling people to “put a cork in it,” “zip it” or “shut up!”
The yin and yang of free speech has been with us from the dawn of the republic. The 1790s were a free-for-all of slanderous and incendiary letters and columns, mostly anonymous, published in partisan newspapers and handbills maligning whoever the writer considered the villain du jour.
Not even George Washington was spared. Thomas Paine famously called him a “tyrant” and “the patron of fraud.” This led a few years later to President John Adams signing the infamous “Alien and Sedition Acts,” which made it a crime to criticize the government. Now that’s as censored as you can get.
Today’s hue and cry over book banning, cancel culture and boycotting everything from Bud Light to the entire state of Florida is nothing new in the land of free speech. Even benign, sweet, (some say) saccharine “The Sound of Music” is not exempt.
Rolling Hills Elementary in Fullerton made headlines when Robert Pletka, the school district superintendent, ordered the school to cut the Nazis from the beloved musical along with swastikas and fascist banners. This prompted a torrent of outrage, pitting parents in favor of the cuts against those opposed.
Then a funny thing happened.
Instead of venting on social media about this latest example of woke nuttiness, I took the time to find out why the school superintendent made his decision. Suddenly, things weren’t so black and white.
“In this time of social media,” wrote Pletka in an email to parents and faculty, “it is likely that well-meaning parents and community members would share these images, inadvertently associating our children with signs, flags, armbands and gestures linked to the atrocities of the genocide of the Jews.”
Sadly, Mr. Pletka is correct.
In the age of cell phone cameras and the all-knowing, all-seeing social media universe, photos of small children in Nazi uniforms and swastika armbands shouting “Heil, Hitler!” can end up as posts by trolls and ideologues who turn them into recruiting memes for hate groups or propaganda for perverse ideology. This is a real-world problem school officials could not have imagined when I was a kid. Of course, when I was a kid, they could barely imagine electricity.
“These signs, symbols and gestures continue to be used in association with heinous hate crimes even in present times,” continued Superintendent Pletka.
That’s something else those of us born in the aftermath of World War II could not imagine. How ignorant of history do you have to be to embrace the swastika or hammer and sickle in 2023?
So, what is a school superintendent to do?
While it’s not appropriate to traumatize young children with the specific, horrific details of the Holocaust, for 60 years “The Sound of Music” has been an excellent way to introduce children to the Nazis as history’s ultimate bad guys. That adults may pervert photos of children in costume in a school play to teach the opposite is a risk, but the alternative carries a risk as well. Not teaching children about the threat of hateful ideologies is to keep the next generation in a cocoon of unreality while opening the door to the evils of history deniers.
While it’s easy to criticize Superintendent Pletka for scrubbing the Nazis from “The Sound of Music” (and I initially did), it’s important to keep in mind how complex life is today for anyone negotiating the pitfalls of the digital age and its impact on kids where photos taken in childhood can follow them for the rest of their lives.
Despite the best intentions, it’s a mistake to over-protect kids from the challenges they will face in life.
Email: Doug@DougMcIntyre.com. Doug’s debut novel, “Frank’s Shadow,” is now available for pre-order at BarnesandNoble.com and Amazon.com and in stores, July 18.