Barney Rubble

There's a great song by Jerry Lee Lewis called "Hell And Half Of Georgia," but lately it seems you have to go a little farther south to get there.

So here it is! FLORIDA MAN - the chairman of the school board of a charter school, a man named Barney Bishop III, forced the school's principal to resign last week after the parents of her sixth-graders complained that her Renaissance art syllabus was not appropriate for kids of that age.

As we all know, today, the parents - no matter their level of education or sophistication - are the deciding force in school curricula. Which is not to say that parents' voices should not be heard, but any sensible person would know to lend a bit more credence to career educators with experience and education over, say, a maleducated redhatter with little or no education and worldly wisdom.

This principal showed her class Michelangelo's "DAVID." Not surprisingly for a state that close to the equator, one parent called this classic sculpture "pornographic." 

Merriam-Webster defines pornography as "the depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction." Friends, if seeing this statue arouses in you an intense emotional reaction, please consider counseling at once.

Bishop told Slate that that wasn't so much that kids who can go home and see hours of bacchanalian debauchery on their phones before dinner got to see a nekkid man, but that the teacher told the kids it was a nonpornographic picture they were seeing.

Note the wisdom in this statement from Bishop, a man who self-describes as a "serial entrepreneur": 

“Parents choose this school because they want a certain kind of education. We’re not gonna have courses from the College Board. We’re not gonna teach 1619 or CRT crap. I know they do all that up in Virginia. The rights of parents, that trumps the rights of kids. Teachers are the experts? Teachers have all the knowledge? Are you kidding me?”

They simply cannot refrain from saying "trump," even in lower case, and CRT, as if they know what it is. 

Hope Carrasquilla, the now-former principal of Tallahassee Classical School, said that one parent felt “point-blank upset” and that “her child should not be viewing” the 16th-century Renaissance sculpture showing David, the man made famous in the Old Testament’s Book of Samuel for KO-ing Goliath.

This school goes by the “classical education curriculum model” that Floridians seem to think is just great, and here's why they do: it's all about the “centrality of the Western tradition,” or what the Tampa Bay Times calls “a historical focus on white, Western European and Judeo-Christian foundations.”  

These are the kind of people who think their children should not learn to use Arabic numerals.

More from Bishop: 

“Showing the entire statue of David is appropriate at some age. We’re going to figure out when that is. And you don’t have to show the whole statue! Maybe to kindergartners we only show the head. You can appreciate that. You can show the hands, the arms, the muscles, the beautiful work Michelangelo did in marble, without showing the whole thing.”

The "whole thing." Paging Dr. Freud!