Art teacher, school spar after nude complaints on field trip
FRISCO — Like the artwork that teacher Sydney McGee insists she was fired for letting her students study, her former school says there’s more to her dismissal than first glimpse. McGee, who taught elementary school in this sprawling and retail-bloated Dallas suburb, has drawn national sympathy and disbelief since claiming she was let go last month because a parent complained that their child saw a nude piece during a field trip to the Dallas Museum of Art. Eighty-nine of McGee’s fifth-graders toured the museum during the April trip, which McGee concedes likely included nudes but was arranged as a chance to see Picassos and Piet Mondrians.
Interesting, isn’t it? Our children see untold thousands of violent acts, but let them see a naked body, and it’s OHMIGOD!!!!!!!!!!!! WHAT ABOUT OUR INNOCENT, IMPRESSIONABALE, PRICELESS YOUNG ‘UNS??? WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN?? The hypocrisy is almost tangible. A person can be murdered, maimed, or dismembered on television or in a movie theater, and few bat an eyelash, but let a child get a glimpse of a naked female breast- even among the artworks in a museum- and there’s Hell to pay.
I’m certain there’s a whole lot more to this story than has come to light, but the fact that a parent would be so stupid and narrow-minded about nudity in artworks is something that absolutely baffles me. Are we really so ashamed of the human body that we have to declare it dirty and nasty and turn it something to be reviled, shunned, and treated as an object of shame?
It’s not as if McGee was trafficking in pornography; she was exposing her children to art in an art museum. Where some might see beauty and a statement on the human condition, some saw McGee exposing their children to nudity and filth. For Lawson and the Frisco School Board to discipline McGee for this should be taken as convincing proof of just how stupid and narrow some good, God-fearing “Christians” can be.
Yeah; right…if these people are Christians, then I’m the Queen of England.
It makes sense, I suppose, that ignorant and fearful fools would raise children who grow up to be ignorant and fearful fools. It would be nice to think that people could recongize the intellectual vapidity and the hypocrisy they’re raising their children with…but that would probably be expecting a bit too much. Most of these maroons wouldn’t recognize art if it ran up and bit them on the ass.
