Parents or the State?

Above: Michaelangelo's "David."

Following is a Facebook "discussion" following my post of a comment about a Florida charter school principal who was pressured to resign after a parent complained students were exposed to pornography during a Renaissance art lesson that featured Michelangelo’s “David” sculpture.

SDT: Teacher's selection of The David was unnecessarily prevocational. Another Michaelangelo sculpture, say The Pieta, could have been used leaving to parental discretion whatever Michaelangelo sculpture they would allow their kids to see.

XYZ: Are you really saying this, or are you kidding? Oh, my goodness, here is the problem. The teacher's choice prevocational? The ignorance that accompanies this situation is that jaded? By the way ... his name is not Michaelangelo...I guess you can blame spell check for this, twice. But just in case the real MICHELANGELO di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, a real Renaissance man, the most accomplished artist of his era, would probably, if he could, look at this and just die again laughing about the absurdity of this situation. A parent (three in this case) should have only the right to decide what is right for their children. What the problem is, and it is a big one in Florida, with the book banning, etc., that those three parents decided that no other child should be allowed to see this masterpiece. Period. And please don't edit your post.

ABC: I would really feel sorry for any kid of yours. After 30 years of being shielded from Michelangelo, they’d emerge from your basement clueless as a newborn chick.

SDT: One time, riding solo on my Ducati ST4s motorcycle, in Florence I joined my wife and her three friends who were traveling separately. I joined them for breakfast. "What are we going to do today?" I asked them at breakfast, the morning after my arrival. My wife said, "why don't you go see the Duomo and The David." "Well, what are you guys gonna (sic) do?" I asked. We're going to Christophel, Frette, and Tod's," my wife replied.

SDT:

My deliberately prevocational post (I can't help it!) elicited the expected responses... which ignored my premise that showing explicit Rennaissance art to kids might be a parental call. The exchange demonstrates how people who choose to dialogue publicly talk around, not to, each other these days.

I don't have a problem with a high school curriculum showing explicit Renaissance art (grade school curriculum, maybe, not so much).

The statement of one of the correspondents implying that most parents would (wrongly in the correspondent's view) restrict view of the statue I don't believe to be correct. The correspondent's implication, that the school is right and that parents are wrong, shows a dangerous mindset that believes in the state's right to overrule parents in matters of curriculum.

Practically speaking, the teacher, knowing his audience (it was a charter school - eg. activist parents), deliberately threw a cat amongst the pigeons when he could have conveyed the necessary artistic message without using The David as subject matter.

In the thread I posted a couple of top-of-mind, non-sequitur quips about a visit to Florence and a cover image of the Irving Stone biography of Michaelangelo, "The Agony and the Ecstasy," which I have read.