The naked truth

Sydney McGee, an award-winning art teacher of 28 years, was recently fired from her job at a Frisco, Texas, elementary school. Did she abuse a student? Sell drugs on the playground? Accept a bribe?\nNope. She took her class on a field trip.\nMcGee's troubles started last April, when a student saw a nude sculpture while McGee and 89 Fisher Elementary fifth graders were visiting the Dallas Museum of Art. The next day, Principal Nancy Lawson scolded McGee, although Lawson urged her to conduct the field trip in the first place. \nThe Frisco School Board decided to release McGee and did not grant her a transfer to another school. The district asserted there are other "performance issues" that led to McGee's discharge, including lesson planning, and the field trip was not the only reason for her dismissal. \nIt would be wise for Lawson and co. to establish what these performance issues were. Until these unidentified faults are revealed, we believe the Frisco School District has made a grave mistake. McGee's firing represents a disrespect toward art, the human body and education itself. \nMcGee spoke with the museum employees in advance for approval of the content. The children's parents as well as the principal approved the museum trip.\nWhat this fifth-grader saw is not pornography; it is art. School administrators and parents would be naive if they thought there are no nude sculptures in a museum. What would have happened if a teacher took a group of students to the zoo and a student saw hippos mating? Should the teacher know not to take his or her students to the zoo during mating season?\nTo attempt to classify any and all works with nude subjects as pornographic would be to dismiss countless masterpieces across thousands of years as being nothing more than base attempts at titillation. Besides obvious targets such as the "Venus de Milo" and Michelangelo's "David," such parochial thinking would claim Da Vinci's investigations of the human body, ground-breaking examinations of human perception such as Marcel DuChamp's dadaist "Nude Descending Staircase," Pablo Picasso's cubist works and Salvador Dali's attempts to capture the imagery of dreams are all mere pornography. It would be tantamount to slamming the door on a key avenue by which humanity has sought to understand itself. \nPerhaps these parents wish to raise children that are intellectually stunted, maladjusted and unprepared for the world around them -- art aside, just imagine what it'll be like when these kids grow up and see nude people in the flesh. But our public schools should not have a role in aiding and abetting them. Art will continue to flourish, and the beauty of the human body will not diminish. As for a small elementary school in Texas, its sadness lies in the deprivation of its students.