I need to be nasty for a moment
Some parents in Georgia need a lesson in logic and reality. Take one Tina McCurley.
She’s the mother of a student at Westside Middle School in Georgia. Here’s what happened and why I say so.
Her daughter’s history class was shown the first five minutes of 300 as part of a history class. Five minutes. Got that?
Parents complained, as they tend to do about everything these days.
The executive director of assessment and accountability for the county’s schools looked into it. He said,
“I watched it with the principal (Stan Stewart). The clip had no profanity, no nudity, no violence,” he said. “It depicts a Spartan boy and the process he went through in attempting to attain manhood. We didn’t find it disturbing and thought it was appropriate to the lesson. There were no battle scenes. The clip starts with a boy as a baby and ends as he enters the army.”
Got that? Five minutes of the movie, no violence. (That’s better than most of the cartoons on TV these days — ever see Kim Possible?)
But Ms. McCurley weighed in thusly:
“From everything I’ve read, the previews and the trailer, I don’t feel the movie is appropriate for these students. If movie theaters can’t show rated-R movies without a parent present, how can they do this in the schools?”
Reminder: The movie wasn’t shown. Just five minutes of it. In fact, McCurley said (later in the article) that she saw “nothing wrong with the movie’s first five minutes.”
Still, she said, “I don’t care if it was one minute. ‘R’ movies have no place in our schools.”
So let’s look at her logic: Even though what the kids saw had “no profanity, no nudity, no violence,” because other parts of the movie had those things, the evil inherent in them must have seeped into those first five minutes even if you couldn’t see it.
Or, perhaps, having an R-rated DVD physically in the school building is dangerous.
That’s the only way to explain her comment.
Leland says:
Ignorance is bliss.