the teacher was sent home on Wednesday after reading a passage from Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation in which Frank wrote about male and female genitalia.
I don’t remember reading anything about male and female genitalia in Ann Frank’s diary…😕
It’s been released with several edits over the years. The recently released version added back several passages that were scrubbed from the ones most of us read growing up.
Anne Frank wrote a diary. It’s a personal diary. It wasn’t written to be published.
New pages found writing dirty jokes and about sex: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/05/16/anne-franks-hidden-diary-pages-risque-jokes-and-sex-education/
On one hand, the “sanitized” versions give the historical context without the personal, sometimes very personal, items that Anne Frank intended to be private. On the other hand, including all of her real thoughts makes it clear that she was a normal, young, very human girl.
I think the full version should be available to anyone and everyone, but I also understand if the school curriculum needs to focus on the historical aspects and thus uses one of the older releases editions. But to be honest, it seems like the people who would have a problem with this have a problem with all sexuality, and they hate anything that destroys the narrative that people can shut off that part of themselves.
I think having the less sanitized version being taught is potentially more valuable. Part of the value of the diary is providing someone to have empathy with, not to just read a history book about a character. Showing that she was a real person and had similar thoughts to all the other children in the class can help them understand she was real and this could happen to anyone, including themselves. It helps us treat history not just as something that happened but something that is happening.
I found e.g.
https://jezebel.com/this-is-the-pornographic-anne-frank-excerpt-thats-causi-484571352
and
https://www.dw.com/en/secret-pages-in-anne-franks-diary-reveal-her-reflections-on-sex/a-43803106
🙄 throw away a good teacher for this…if Ann was the same age as the class, it’s probably the stuff people their age gossip about anyway.
Sorry - I’m not subscribed anymore and it let me read it so I thought it was open.
This is an older article and I don’t think it talks about the new pages that were found with the dirty jokes. But it talks and quotes the “explicit” parts.
The wiki discusses the publication history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diary_of_a_Young_Girl#:~:text=There%20are%20two%20versions%20of,to%20document%20the%20war%20period.
