It never fails to amaze me how parents surrender their children to schools for education, but are too quick to prevent schools to prepare and train their offspring for real life. Last month, a Texas teacher was reprimanded — and appears she wont be getting her contract renewed — because she took her fifth grade class to the Dallas Museum of Art and, of all things, they saw nude art.Oh, how awful! Eleven-year-olds actually seeing artistic representations of the human form. The parent signs a consent form to let a child go to an art museum in a major American city and is oblivious to the possibility that the naked human form might be depicted in art?
The Dallas Morning News reported that when 28-year veteran teacher Sydney McGee took her students to the major museum, the students were exposed to nude statues and other nude art representations. Before the trip in April, she had visited the museum and spoke with museum staff “to ensure that it was appropriate for the fifth-grade class. As is the routine for field trips, parents sign consent forms.
As typically happens, some overprotective parent complained shortly after the field trip.” Just one parent. So the next day, the principal in Fisher Elementary School District called McGee into a meeting to admonish her about the parents complaint. Shortly, thereafter, she received a negative review and a series of directives about displaying artwork and creating lesson plans, the Morning News reported. McGee then asked to be transferred to another school, but it was denied by the school board, which met on Aug. 21. The story gets murky over performance reviews and whether administrators were using the art trip incident, or not, in taking action against McGee. She is on administrative leave with pay and theres a recommendation to not renew her contract.
Obviously, students across the world go on field trips to museum of all sorts all the time — be it to see natural history exhibits with ancient peoples in much less state of dress or to art museums where the famous and not-so-famous have plied their skills to portray humans, cherubs, angels and being without clothing because it is a natural, unpretentious and grand form. Philistines would perhaps say art museums possess insidious pieces of work that corrupt minds. But art museum arent porn shops.
Five years ago when we spent the day in some of the Vaticans seemingly endless museums of art — including the Sistine Chapel — it occurred to me that the Roman Catholic Church got it right to gather and preserve the finest available art work of human history. So much of it portrays humans sans clothes. What better endorsement of the human form, displayed through art, than the Catholic Church despite its other famous conservative approaches to things.
Every so often, we hear about conservative organizations opting to hold conferences or meetings in locations with permanent art fixtures, including a nude statue or two. There have been groups that literally put clothing on the statues to protect the eyes of their members. And we know how, in puritanical periods, so many paintings with unadorned figures were painted over with clothing later by other artists. Or how former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered a curtain be put up in in the Great Hall of the U.S. Department of Justice in 2002, at a cost of $8,000, so photographers could no longer get him in the same photo with the two art deco aluminum statues, with exposed breasts. Since then the drape has come down. It gets bizarre.
Lets teach our children they have beautiful bodies, and God made them magnificently. What could be healthier?
