December 12, 2023

"Some students averted their gaze, felt offended, said they were shocked.... some also alleged the teacher made racist comments....”


The students were 10 to 11 years old. They were exposed to a Renaissance painting that depicts the story of Diana and Actaeon from Ovid's Metamorphoses — with 5 female nudes.
Staff felt they had been left unsupported and were working in a "degraded climate".... She said the case recalled the brutal killing of Samuel Paty, who was murdered after he showed caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad in a class. French authorities believe untrue rumours spread about the class contributed to inciting an 18-year-old radicalised Chechen refugee to murder him close to the teacher's school in a Paris suburb....

62 comments:

iowan2 said...

Why the need to expose 11 year olds to this art?

What is it about educators hell bent on sexualizing children? I have no information of France, hopefully they are not as educationally bankrupt as the USA. But surely extra focus on reading ciphering, and science would pay bigger dividends than embarrassing 11 year olds

Readering said...

North African students?

gspencer said...

Muslims, bound and determined to stay in the 7th Century.

And by all evidence succeeding.

Sebastian said...

"some also alleged"

This couldn't be Muslim kids making stuff up, as they have before, could it?

Let's have the recordings.

Deirdre Mundy said...

Iowan2: It was Titian, hardly sexualizing children.

mikee said...

The school is disciplining the brats and they are being told "to adhere to the values of the Republic." Good.

This is the correct response when a fundamentalist religion intersects with democratic society. The religion can be followed personally, but nobody else has to follow your beliefs or accommodate your beliefs. At school your being offended is not cause for anything other than being told to grow the hell up and stop being a whiner.

n.n said...

Grooming and diversity are first-order forcings of [catastrophic] anthropogenic [social] climate change. Teacher! Leave them kids alone...

roger said...

Iowa, I might suggest there's a tremendous gap between creating a secret transgender identity at school meant to be concealed from parents and teaching Renaissance art.

roger said...

Yes, Readering, the accusations regarding racist and islamophobic remarks suggest a certain ethnic composition within the classroom. Such complaints may well flow from lack of assimilation into the General European culture.

Narr said...

Not bloody enough for a lot of them, I'd wager.

Every one of those young scholars has a smartphone, and can view better pRon with ease. This is not about nudity.





PM said...

Huh, thought web access pretty much made everything unshockable.

Mary Beth said...

Why the need to expose 11 year olds to this art?

Why would they not? It's not obscene. It's not sexualizing.

I would like to see all middle school students having a class that teaches them about Western art as part of a foundation for learning to appreciate Western civilization. The reading, ciphering, and science would be in there too. It's not an either/or choice.

Old and slow said...

They really went out of their way to be vague and uninformative about the nature of the conflict. Still, it was easy enough to figure it out, even if the BBC was unwilling to say what was happening. Muslims were offended, teachers were in fear for their lives, and rightly so.

Islam is simply not compatible with decent modern society. It needs to fix itself or be quarantined utterly.

Josephbleau said...

The murderer is the majority vote. We have a "Justice System." To protect the murderer from the citizens.

Now we have schools in Gaza run by the UN. "Oil is applied to the exhaust ports in the gas tube to allow blowback under conditions of mud and water infiltration." Kids in Gaza need to know how an AK 47 works more than they need to know Palestinian literature and culture, true because there is none.

B. said...

First year high school students are 11 and 12?

robother said...

I can see where Islamic types beheading a fellow teacher might literally make one Islamophobic. But apparently in France, as in the USA, the fear of Muslims is the real crime, worse even than the violence inspiring the fear. The suicide of the West indeed.

Jupiter said...

"Staff felt they had been left unsupported and were working in a "degraded climate", Ms Venetitay said."

Allowing a large number of Muzzie scum to invade you country does tend to fuck things up. Although one does have to question the pedagogical importance of that painting. Kids get up early in the morning and hustle off to school so they can be shown that painting? Is this supposed to make them better factory workers, or what?

Ironclad said...

But they can walk around Paris and see nude statues and go to the Louve ( which they would love to burn) and see great western art that would corrupt their little dark souls. France - and most of Western Europe made a huge mistake by allowing the import of large Muslim populations and not demanding they assimilate. France pretended they were becoming French and now we have the situation where popular anger has reached a boiling point over the “ cultural enrichment” these folks have brought home.

There is going to be a reckoning and it’s not going to be pretty - I’m betting one of the Scandinavian states will be the first to start mass expulsions - and there will be an avalanche throughout the rest of Europe when it happens.

Rosalyn C. said...

It’s very hard to make a judgment about what’s appropriate in French culture. I doubt this was an age issue, but rather an issue of Islamic modesty.

Tom T. said...

It's even more scandalous than you might think: the painter was Titian.

Oso Negro said...

@iowan2 - Mon Dieu! It's France. Nudity is mandatory. If you don't like it go somewhere else.

Joe Smith said...

French kids? Kids with smart phones and unlimited access to porn?

Wow...the French are really slipping...

john said...

For crying out loud, the school is in Paris. Your not going to walk down a street without seeing statues or artwork containing nudes. Seeing a nude is sexualizing children? Give me a fucking break.

gilbar said...

please tell me Again; WHY we are doing this to little kids? IS there a reason?
I mean, other than to make them want to lop their breasts or dicks off?

Kevin said...

What is France without nudity?

Ice Nine said...

>Readering said...
North African students?<

Naa, you don't suppose, do ya?

Big Mike said...

"Some students averted their gaze, felt offended, said they were shocked ..."

And then went home and logged onto PornHub.

But, I agree with iowan2. One can convey the tragic story of Actaeon stumbling upon "chaste" (yeah, right, a chaste goddess of love) Diana without actually showing naked women.

rhhardin said...

Italy has penises all over. I'm surprised women aren't fainting on the streets.

TickTock said...

Most of Europe seemed much more accepting of nudity than Americans were when I was young. It just wasn't the issue Iowan2 seems to think it is today. But it is just another example of the grave mistakes made by Chancellor Markel when she thought Europe could accept large numbers of Muslim migrants and remain Europe. There is not strength in diversity, there is division.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Children in latency often respond this way to depictions of nudity, especially when they are in a peer group. They usually do better when attending a museum with their parents or traveling to a big city where such things might be seen. They may not be ready to contemplate their own sexuality - nor should they - but they do get the idea that "This is a different situation than my school or neighborhood. They do things differently here." And they take cues from their parents. Countries that have topless beaches, tiny bathing suits, or public saunas still do not allow such things at school. You can teach Place to children pretty early. But deciding that you will ignore convention because you Have a Better Idea usually ends up about like this.

The Balinese do not even blink at surfing tourists with little on, but are scandalised by display by their own young people, especially females.

As for the accusations of racism, etc, the children may have also figured out that this is what gets adult attention these days.

Gospace said...

Completely fails to identify the students by anything like nation of origin, religion, or anything like that.

Possibly to probably applicable. I'm leaning to the latter.

But 10-11 years olds? Honestly, too young. Even in Western culture. Unless, or course, you're grooming them or something like that. But then, these days, how do we know they aren't trading nudes on their smartphones?

I'm fairly certain my local school district in this rural area in CNY doesn't cover artwork like that in the curriculum. Not even in art classes. There's plenty of non-nude art to use as examples.

But in college or in art schools specifically? Artists are noted for being libertine - or is that depraved? A standard plot for sitcoms is a girl- or guy- who picks up some extra bucks posing nude for an art class. With all the variations of embarrassing things that could happen. Like finding out Mom or Dad or significant other is on the class... Of course, if nudity was a nothingburger as these teachers seem to think- why is it embarrassing?

The "teacher made racist comments" remark is an identifier that suggests the students aren't native French with parents the same. France is known for decadence after all. Isn't it?

Old and slow said...

Christ, did no one read the article? And read between the lines a bit, of course. It feels like the IQ level around here is dropping recently.

Oligonicella said...

"This is why I draw him."

TaeJohnDo said...

"Muslims, bound and determined to stay in the 7th Century.

And by all evidence succeeding."

And they fully intend on taking the rest of the world down to their 7th Century level.

Oligonicella said...

Big Mike:
One can convey the tragic story of Actaeon stumbling upon "chaste" (yeah, right, a chaste goddess of love) Diana without actually showing naked women.

This is the entire tragic story:

Actaeon sees Diana bathing with her nymph attendants. A second later she splashes water on him turning him into a deer and he splits. He's then run down by his own hounds and killed.

The point of the story being he saw her nude and she punished him. That's not chaste. That's taking affront.

Rather appropriate to the situation.

I stand with the painter.

Michelle Dulak Thomson said...

Big Mike,

You are thinking of Aphrodite/Venus. Artemis/Diana is the huntress, and yes, she is generally depicted as chaste.

Jupiter said...

"One can convey the tragic story of Actaeon stumbling upon "chaste" (yeah, right, a chaste goddess of love) Diana without actually showing naked women."

Diana was most assuredly not a goddess of love. You are probably confusing her with Venus. Also known as Astarte. Also known as Esther. All meaning Eastern star.

Just as my name, Jove, begins with J, which the Romans pronounced as Y, then has a V in the middle, which the Romans pronounced as U, and which we would now spell as W. So that "JOVE" becomes "YOWEH". Of course, the ancients tended to elide vowels, and represent the word by its consonants. YAHWEH, YOHWEH. Whatever. So yes, I am He. And She is She. These days, you can see me in the Eastern sky after sunset. I'm not sure where Diana is, I'll check. Some times She's the morning star, sometimes She's the evening star. But she's always a woman to me.

Earnest Prole said...

They were exposed to a Renaissance painting

Res ipsa loquitur.

William said...

You call that obscene? Look at it as fat positive. Children seeing such a picture might develop more positive attitudes towards their chubby peers.....As Renaissance paintings go, it's pretty tame. Back in the grim days before we learned how to assemble porn on the assembly line, Life magazine would occasionally have an art issue. Those issues always sold well. That was the only place where you could see naked women. I remember some pictures of Leda and the swan that were pretty hot. I think my own twisted ideas of sexuality are a direct result of viewing those pictures at such a young age. I'm not against bestiality, but it should be restricted to mammalian partners.

Enigma said...

My main takeaway is that the BBC has lost its credibility and avoids tough news. They spend a lot of time burying the lede on anything regarding race and ethnicity. If you read this story to the end, the headline should have been "Muslim students file complaints in opposition to centuries of European nude art traditions".

This story follows other BBC cover-ups and ideological screw-ups. It was comically painful to read their tortured avoidance of race and even naming the "ice hockey player who's skates contacted the neck of another player."

The BBC also announced "the first black Briton" in 2016 'documentary'...but with DNA testing she turned out to be from Cyprus. They even depicted her in blackface!

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/uknews/absurd-bbc-plaque-for-first-black-briton-removed-after-dna-found-to-be-cypriot/ar-AA1iTcsZ

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/bbc-plaque-to-mark-earliest-black-briton-removed-because-she-was-from-cyprus/ar-AA1iPYS4

Temujin said...

When you import people who have no intention of assimilating to French culture, or importantly, to Western culture, and instead have every intention of getting you to eventually submit to their culture, how can any of this be a surprise? It's a small step, but merely one more in an array of thousands of steps in which the French are being asked to change. To submit to Islam.

Michel Houellebecq's book "Submission" seems to more and more be coming true. Just as Melanie Phillips 2007 book, "Londonistan", seems to have come true for London. Funny how these 'fringe' things seem to all be playing out.

iowan2 said...

Iowa, I might suggest there's a tremendous gap between creating a secret transgender identity at school meant to be concealed from parents and teaching Renaissance art.

I can teach my kid how babies happen, without firing up PornHub.

Renaissance art is not all nudes. Curating for age used to be a common sense guard rails.

The Crack Emcee said...

This must be Arab kids because, by 10 to 11, French kids are already being plied with wine and encouraged to touch each other. My wife had a nephew I KNEW was going to be gay just by the way they raised him. And the open racism - against everybody?

There was no way I could live there.

The Crack Emcee said...

iowan2 said...

"Why the need to expose 11 year olds to this art?

What is it about educators hell bent on sexualizing children? I have no information of France, hopefully they are not as educationally bankrupt as the USA. But surely extra focus on reading ciphering, and science would pay bigger dividends than embarrassing 11 year olds"

I lived there. You can't tell them - or they're admirers - anything. They think water is medicine. Can't talk them out of it. They're hopeless.

iowan2 said...

Again, with all the input from commenters, I still fail to see the risk benefit here. I am not a prude. I grew up in the 60's with playboy in the house, being read by Mom and Dad in the living room with the whole family present. It was no big deal. I have grand kids that age. My router is not kid proof (can I even do that?), but teachers have the cachet of being an adult, and kids are conditioned to accept what ever they say. But if my Dad caught some other adult taking such liberties, there would have been hell to pay. Turn that anger up to 11 if it happened in a setting like a public school.

My reference is my Iowa experience, but I fail to see the benefit of govt fighting the fight for no known benefit.

If you want to make this about Cultural blending and the results of unrestricted immigration that's a different discussion.

Tarrou said...

"an 18-year-old radicalised Chechen refugee"

As opposed to all the moderate Chechens..........

mikee said...

I see no urns in the painting, but I can still definitively say it is art, not porn.

William said...

Further thoughts about naked women: If the Muslim religion prohibits paintings of the human form, what did they do for visual porn back in the day. I suppose there was the printed word, but, also, back in the day most people were illiterate. Their lives must have been totally devoid of porn. How bleak. The Sultan got to live out an elaborate pornographic sex fantasy, but that was just one man. Not many consolations for the rest....I don't know as the Christians fared much better. It seems only wealthy merchants and aristocrats could afford to hire artists to paint pictures of naked women. All others did without...Sex or, anyway, pornography really was invented after 1964. No one here will admit this, but I'm pretty sure life is more endurable with porn than without.

The Crack Emcee said...

rhhardin said...

"Italy has penises all over. I'm surprised women aren't fainting on the streets."

So does San Francisco's Castro District, which Dave Chappelle called "America's Anus," and I've NEVER seen Republicans give this much support - aren't y'all the people upset over Drag Queen Story Hour? Here are people actually asking for MODESTY - kids even -and you're like FUCK YOU, SHOW THEM YOUR TITS!!!!

It's fascinating how, every time the Palestinians pull off a major action, the whole world flips upside-down. But, especially, morally. The West's cartoon caricature of Arabs, like the Nazi's cartoon caricature of the Jews, allows for a complete abandonment of what they previously stood for (They're all religious nuts, so swear-to-GOD the other side is brainwashed,....) and allows for these wholesale slaughters and massacres.

If there is a God, when I die, nothing he says is going to matter to me after this build-up.

JAORE said...

"My wife had a nephew I KNEW was going to be gay just by the way they raised him."

I'm shocked to NOT see reaction to this statement... by our hostess and a multitude of commenters.

Or do we accept the implication that nurture trumps nature. If we accept that, then should we conclude gays can be deprogrammed successfully?

Dave Begley said...

Victor Davis Hanson, historian and smart guy, says that a multi-racial democracy has never worked. Tribalism gets in the way.

Dave Begley said...

Vivek calls this "the tyranny of the minority."

Robert Cook said...

"Why the need to expose 11 year olds to this art?"

Why not? What's wrong with it? I'm appalled anyone, including the young students, would be offended by it or would avert their eyes.

Enigma said...

@JAORE: "Or do we accept the implication that nurture trumps nature. If we accept that, then should we conclude gays can be deprogrammed successfully?"

The 1970s to 1990s gay and lesbian activist culture shut down research and debate about nature versus nurture. They apparently wanted to draw attention to in-born destiny (e.g., Lady Gaga "Born this Way") and attention away from the potential negative influence of child molesters, Catholic priests, creepy elected officials, and Boy Scout leaders.

The last mainstream biological evidence I heard (circa 2012; before transgenderism blew up) was that gay and lesbian outcomes might follow pre-birth exposure to cross-sex hormones but not genetics per se. Some small children very much seem to be "born that way."

* https://www.science.org/content/article/homosexuality-may-start-womb

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) circa the early 1970s held that homosexuality was sometimes/could be negative. They then become hopelessly political in the 1970s and harbingers of wokeness...so their views are utterly nonscientific now...

* Anti-APA source: https://www.hli.org/resources/apa-on-homosexuality/

* A perhaps woke-friendly academic history of scientific opinion on homosexuality and mental health: https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp-rj.2022.180103

* The very very very woke APA itself: https://www.apa.org/topics/lgbtq/history

Robert Cook said...

"Allowing a large number of Muzzie scum to invade you country does tend to fuck things up."

Don't underestimate the damage that has been and can be done by Xian scum.

Michael said...

Crack wrote “It's fascinating how, every time the Palestinians pull off a major action, the whole world flips upside-down”
LOL. A “major action” against a hipster rave. Crack, Palestine could have been made into a Singapore if it weren’t fixated on killing the Jews. But after all these years of lethargy they can only build Half assed rockets out of the piping that was meant for a water supply. What kind of people can’t provide water or electricity for themselves after decades? The kind of people who thrive on hate and jealousy. The kind of people who think killing hipsters is a major action.

iowan2 said...


Why not? What's wrong with it? I'm appalled anyone, including the young students, would be offended by it or would avert their eyes.


You think you have the right, thus the power to force your culture on students in public schools?

Again, this debate seems much more a debate about the need for assimilation of immigrants.

But this, with Art depicting nudity making children uncomfortable, brings to mind the Gay literature. The gay crowd claims it is a necessity to make some feel normal.

But the problem then becomes, IF those books are deemed necessary, buy a school functionary, or administration. Then the reverse must be accepted. That the gay lifestyle is dangerous, and harmful to those that participate. This opinion must be allowed to stand in the school library and teachers much be allowed to "teach" such a message in the class room.

So which is it?

The Crack Emcee said...

Dave Begley said...

"Victor Davis Hanson, historian and smart guy, says that a multi-racial democracy has never worked. Tribalism gets in the way."

Yeah, yeah, then he goes on about how well HE gets along with his Mexican neighbors. These people don't hear themselves sometimes. Thomas Sowell can talk all day about what certain people "don't know," in an accusatory tone whites seem to enjoy, because it implies those people somehow should've known, when they've never been heard of Thomas Sowell. And they usually don't know what Sowell's talking about because of policies and directives whites previously enacted.

For the record: Blacks and anything derived from us = Tribalism. Whites and all their historical baggage and bullshit = NOT Tribalism.

Enigma said...

@Robert Cook: "the damage that has been and can be done by Xian scum."

Yeah, Chairman Xi has imprisoned and sterilized the Uyghers and done a lot to destroy the environment as his slaves made your electronics. And he looks like Winnie the Pooh.

Oh, you meant THAT "Xian"...two insults do not make a compliment.

Narr said...

GIGO works with populations as much as with computer inputs.

Oligonicella said...

iowan2:
But this, with Art depicting nudity making children uncomfortable, brings to mind the Gay literature. The gay crowd claims it is a necessity to make some feel normal.

Helluva jump from a few tits of women attempting to hide themselves to a friggin' cartoon of a blowjob.

I reject any equivalency.

Oligonicella said...

iowan2:
Then the reverse must be accepted.

No it must not. Everything is not a bifurcation. Society does not function like a circuit board.