Another example of why Europeans think Americans are idiots

[jg10003]

https://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2017/12/29/us/ap-us-teacher-fired-nude-paintings.html?rref=collection%2Fsectioncollection%2Faponline-national

Utah Teacher Fired After Students See Nudity in Art

LOGAN, Utah — A Utah art teacher was fired amid complaints that images of classical paintings containing nudity were passed out in a classroom and seen by sixth-graders, a newspaper reported.

Mateo Rueda said he wasn't aware that a set of educational postcards from the elementary school library contained a few works depicting nudity when he handed them out during a lesson, the Herald Journal newspaper said Thursday....

Cache County deputies found Principal Jeni Buist shredding postcards — at the request of the school district — that contained nudity, said Sheriff Chad Jensen....

The two images seen by students were the Impressionist-era portrait "Iris Tree" by Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani and the Rococo-style partial nude "Odalisque" by 18th-century artist Francois Boucher....

The 2 paintings in question:

[onethatcares]

1. OMG!!!!!!

you can see her buttbutt and her boobies............ someone save the children, halp, halp, halp.

My granddaughter informed me there were banned books in this country. I was amazed at the ones that are not available to high school kids unless they are in advanced placement programs.

We as a country have died from within.

[maxsolomon]

2. Thus it has always been

Puritans got the boot for a reason.

[forgotmylogin]

3. I'm gonna take the unpopular road on this.

I am all for art and art education, but I can totally see how both of those specific images could cause a problem in a school with teenage or grade school age boys possessing the mindsets of Beavis and Butthead. The problem isn't the nudity, the problem is the teacher claiming he "did not know" those images were among what he passed out. It's the teacher's job to review all classroom materials and judge whether they are appropriate for the lesson being taught. This is the type of art that a teacher might possibly show slides of, but definitely should not pass around as easily pocketed postcards.

I am inferring these cards ended up stolen, passed around, leered at, and caused problems for the school outside the context of art class where they were being touted as "dirty pictures." The English teacher shouldn't need to be the one to explain the context of a realistic nude painting that ends up going around their class. Woe to the principal who gets a call from the parent who wants to know what teacher gave their child an erotic postcard featuring a realistically depicted naked woman tastefully rendered but still in the pose of a Playboy model.