Oh, let’s start out this rainy weekend (here in Northern Virginia, at least) with an ethics quiz on a theme that will be recurring on Ethics Alarms today if all goes as planned (which it seldom does).
Tallahassee (Florida) Classical School principal Hope Carrasquilla was given a choice between being fired or resigning following complaints by parents over a recent art lesson in the charter school that included Michelangelo’s famous “David” statue and his Sistine Chapel “Creation of Adam” fresco painting.
After all, pee-pees were involved.
The stated mission of the Tallahassee Classical School is “training the minds and improving the hearts of young people through a content-rich classical education in the liberal arts and sciences, with instruction in the principles of moral character and civic virtue.” The school also maintains that “reform of American public education, to be successful and good, must be built on a foundation of classical liberal arts learning.” Presumably parents who enrolled their children in the school were aware of this orientation.
Moreover, it is fair to say that “David” is just about as iconic a symbol of the classical arts as one could name, with perhaps the Venus de Milo being the only competition. Yet after three parents complained about their 6th graders being exposed to images of “David” (and the naked Adam in the Sistine Chapel painting), the school’s principal was forced out.
Conservative Hillsdale College provides the curriculum, training, and resources for the school as well as for other public schools through Hillsdale’s K-12 support. This was not an example of parents rising up against an extreme left-wing curriculum. Yet one of the parents famously denounced “David” as “pornography.”
Your Ethics Alarms Fine Arts Ethics Quiz of the Day is….
Is it inappropriate and irresponsible to display “David” in an art course for Sixth Graders?
The school held an emergency meeting a few days after the controversial art class, and the school board’s chair, Barney Bishop, gave Carrasquilla the option of resigning or being fired. Carrasquilla had been principal at the school for less than a year, and decided to resign. The art teacher who gave that dirty lesson in 16th Cnetury art was required to write an apology letter to parents but was not disciplined beyond that.
The school now claims that there had been other issues involving Carrasquilla’s leadership, suggesting that the sculpture was just the penis that broke the camel’s back, so to speak, though absent more details, that sounds like a cover story to me. The Tallahassee Classical School had instituted a rule in February requiring teachers to provide parents with at least a one-week advanced notice of lesson plans when they include “sensitive” topics, words, or images so the parents can decide if they want their child to participate in that class. In this case, the teacher did not send out such a letter, which Carrasquilla attributed to a “series of miscommunications.”
As the night follows day, the episode is being used by critics of Florida’s Parental Rights in Education to show how parents are not qualified to decide what is appropriate curriculum fare. I have to say that firing a principal over the showing of an iconic work like “David” seems juuust a bit hysterical, and does not put the cause of parental oversight in its best light. There is a big difference between teaching sixth graders about classic art works and bringing in a drag queen for “show and tell.”
For the record, I had seen “David” many times by the time I was 12, and I was not shocked by the statue’s “pornographic” details.
I had seen the equivalent before…many times.
Ethics Alarms 
Personally I would not show the statue to the 6th graders I went to sixth grade with, just because they were too immature not to see it and immediately starting with the stupid comments and jokes, negating any educational value. That’s not to say some more mature 6th graders couldn’t have handled it. It’s certainly poles away from drag queen story hour, which I still can’t believe is even a thing.
A vigorous second.
As a former teacher of sixth, seventh and eighth graders, you’re just inviting chaos in the classroom, particularly if it’s a mixed classroom, which I assume it was. A class that age is hard enough to control under ideal circumstances. If that had been shown in my sixth-grade class, Hunter Wagner would have grabbed his belly, guffawed out loud, and fallen to the floor and rolled around until Sister Frederick Marie could get him to calm down.
I attended and taught at parochial schools. The nuns would never have gone for full frontal nudity in our classrooms. And I’m okay with that. And keep in mind, to the eternal amusement of Mrs. OB, OB’s saintly mother famously acquired at great expense a set of colored magic markers for the sole purpose of marking over the deliciously exposed breasts of the Etruscan women in an illustrated history of Greek and Roman times she acquired for me, probably when I was seven or eight. Of course, you could see right through the ink that matched the colorful and extremely alluring outfits sported by the spectacular women. I’ve always wondered whether my mother’s efforts had the opposite of her intended effect. I like to think of myself as “a face man,” but maybe not.
The firing seems a little extreme. Maybe the principle really is a screw up who had to be fired. Given the stories coming out of schools where no one ever suffers any consequences for stupidity, I’m going to give the firing entity the benefit of the doubt. I seem to recall seeing a recent headline somewhere to the effect of “First we fire all the principals.” Let the firing begin.
One of the (endlessly amusing and high billing) partners at the big firm I started with once suggested, not comically, we randomly “fire one secretary a week, just to keep them on their toes.”
I would need more context to understand what exactly the parents were upset about. Teaching Michelangelo‘s David in the proper historical context of art history does not seem objectionable to me. Unfortunately, recent events in the education system have shown that teachers often teach particular topics for alternative, malevolent purposes rather than for education purposes.
Teaching about slavery is good education practice right up until you start throwing “And this is why all white people are evil” into the lesson plan. Teaching biology is good education practice right up until “and this is why men can have babies” gets added into the lecture. Teaching American civics is good education practice right up until “this is why we must get rid of the constitution” is the message of the lesson plan. No one can or should trust anything teachers do or teach anymore, which is the real problem.
I would be interested in knowing the political and ideological backgrounds of the complaining parents. Alinski’s rules for radicals tells the left to use the opponents rules against them. Given that this is Florida and where DiSantis and the Florida legislature are headquartered it makes strategic political sense to attack him on his home turf. That is what this sounds like. Firing the principal and leaving the teacher alone seems foolish and arbitrary. If the teacher has union protections from being fired then by firing the administrator the board effectively neutered all the principals in Florida because the teachers will never have to worry about being disciplined.
Sure I know 6 graders will giggle, laugh and make jokes but this is when it makes sense to correct such behavior. This is one of those socialization skills needed for maturation.
Fascinating observation, Chris. As always.
jvb
No, it’s not unethical. I do agree that sixth graders are not mature enough to appreciate the lesson. In this situation, apparently their parents aren’t either.
I was a Fairfax County Public School’s student in grades 2-10, and I recall a field trip to some DC museum in which I was first exposed, pun unintended, to David and his penis. I’m pretty sure this happened in fifth or sixth grade, and neither I nor my classmates could see anything but David’s penis. Whatever else we were supposed to learn was superseded by the genitalia featured in the museum and gift shop. My takeaway was that my penis looked like David’s, and that was a bit reassuring.
No one was fired and I have no memory of my parents being upset. I don’t remember any kerfuffle regarding what we saw on this field trip; all of my classmates had permission slips. The most vivid memories were of the naked men & women depicted in sculpture or painting. We whispered and giggled; we were all about ten years old.
Some perspective: in 3rd grade, we read Animal Farm. It made no sense to anyone at the time. Neither did 1984. I remembered it, though, and it all came into sharp focus when Trump was elected and the axis of unethical conduct was laid bare.